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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Shelf 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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THE 

Print of His Shoe: 

OR, 

FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



Wherever I have seen the print of his slioe in the earth, 
there I have coveted to set my foot too ! 

■ — Diinyaiis Pilgrim, 






/ 

BY THE 

REV. WILLIAM WYE SMITH. 




BOSTON AND CHICAGO: 
Congregational ^untrag^-Scfjool antr ^ufalisljincf ^octctg* 

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Copyright, 1887, by 
Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society. 



The Library 
OF Congress 



Wa^HUHiGraoil 



Electrotyped and Printed by 
Sta7iley ^^ Usher, lyi Devonshire Street, Boston, Mass. 



PREFACE. 



The short chapters in this volume were mostly writ- 
ten for the young; but I have found that what is 
suitable for young persons is generally interesting also 
to those who are older. A few of the pieces have 
appeared in The Sunday-school Times, Philadelphia, 
and in the Sunday-school periodicals of Mr. David C. 
Cook, Chicago ; and are reproduced here with the per- 
mission of the publishers of those papers. The author 
hopes his little book may be serviceable to those 
beginning to follow the footprints of the Master, and 
to those who are not unwilling to receive counsel 
from an older pilgrim. 

WILLIAM WYE SMITH. 
Newmarket, Ontario, 1886. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

The Print of his Shoe i 

The Likeness of Christ 8 

Assurance 12 

Indifference 15 

Christ's Robe 18 

The City Lieth Four-square ....... 22 

The Jubilee 26 

My Will, Which is Myself 31 

The Conscience 35 

Acted Parables 39 

Reading Between the Lines 42 

Enlisting with Christ 47 . 

Crossing the Red Sea 49 

Christ Alive 52 

One Thing or the Other 54 

Thinking in Right Order . 56 

Justification and Holiness 58 



VI CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Born from Above 6i 

The Far-reaching Nature of God's Law .... 63 
The Three-fold Aspect of God's Covenant ... 69 

Good Sayings of Bad Men 71 

Dividing our Time 74 

Helpers in Prayer 'j'j 

Working from Within 80 

Sowing and Reaping 82 

Jesus on the Cross 84 

Christ as a Yoke-fellow 89 

Jesus in the Old Testament 92 

Providence 95 

The Secret Marriage 98 

One Rule loi 

What Did He Do? 104 

Not all Sin Seen at Once 106 

Giving God Reasons 109 

The End of Sin in 

Conviction through Evidence 113 

Only One Among the Rest 115 

The Sinner a Covenant-breaker 119 

Value of First Impressions 122 

The Purpose of Prophecy 124 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

It is Finished ! 127 

Religion for Use 129 

Some One Thing 131 

Not only Objecting, but Proposing 134 

Tribulation 138 

In the Treasury 140 

'* The Lord is my Shepherd" 142 

Daily Bread 144 

Among the Standing Grain 147 

What Can We Know About Heaven? . . .' • 150 

Memorials ,,,.... ^ 156 



THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 



*^ T HAVE loved to hear my Lord spoken 
X of," said Mr. Standfast, one of Bunyan's 
pilgrims, ''and wherever I have seen the 
print of his shoe in the earth, there I have 
coveted to set my foot too." And our one 
great aim, our one motto and principle all 
through life, ought to be : '' To follow Christ ; 
to please God." A life without an aim is a 
life frittered away and wasted. And no aim 
is worthy of having that perishes with the 
life spent in pursuing it. Our life will never 
rise unless it has something above itself to 
rise to. 

'* But how can I find the print of his shoe ? 
How can I know exactly what pleases him ? " 
You have his Word. God has given us 
all that he saw to be necessary and best in 
the Bible. You will find there, either in 
general principles or in specific advice and 



2 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

direction, what the character and acts of a 
Christian are and should be. And you will 
find the same in examples given ; the best 
example of all being Christ himself. 

" But then there are so many circum- 
stances in which I am placed, where I have 
no example of Christ. I do not know 
whether he ever was in such circumstances 
or not." 

Let me see : you are a school-boy of 
eleven or twelve. Are there any good boys 
in your school } 

'' Oh, the boys are all good. At least, 
they are all pretty fair." 

But try to fix upon one who tries to 
please God ; who imitates Christ as far as 
he can. 

'^Well, there's Willie Roberts. I think 
he is about as sure for heaven as any body I 
know. Yes, I believe Will tries to be like 
Christ." 

It would be easy, would it not, for you to 
suppose what Willie Roberts would do in 



THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 3 

circumstances in which you find yourself, 
but which you never saw him in ? 

'* Yes, I think so. Now if a fellow wanted 
to fight Will, I could just think beforehand 
how he would act. Or if he got an insulting 
note from somebody, or some one asked him 
for help in some distress, I think I know just 
what he would do." 

You know how your friend would act in 
any possible circumstances. If you were 
equally acquainted with Christ, would you 
not know how he would speak and act } And 
would it not be a good exercise for your 
imagination to dwell on Christ more, and 
judge from his character what he would do 
and say in any given case } And you your- 
self do the same. Wouldn't that be follow- 
ing Christ } Would n't that be discovering 
the print of his shoe, that you might set your 
foot there too } Do you think that Jesus 
went to school at your age, as you do ? 

" I don't know. Probably they had n't 
any schools like ours, in Nazareth." 



4 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

You are right : we can not tell. But 
we may be certain he mingled with other 
boys and had at times to stand provocation 
and injustice. Now, if he were at your 
school, he would be something like Willie 
Roberts, only better and more perfect. 

^' But is it right to talk about Christ that 
way ? to make him so common-like, and bring 
him right in among us } " 

Why, yes. And it is putting Christ so 
far away from their every-day life that is the 
■ trouble with most people in the world. Piety 
for a death-bed ; religion for the inside of 
churches ; Bible-reading . for Sunday ; every 
thing else for self and for this world only. 
I once spoke to an old farmer about his 
drinking — a man . who was very pious on 
Sunday, and who would have been vexed to 
be considered any thing else than a Christian. 
He said he had a long distance to haul his 
crop of wheat for sale in winter, and found it 
absolutely necessary to call at a half-way 
tavern and drink something. I said to him 



THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 5 

that Christ went about from place to place, 
preaching, when he was upon earth, and was 
very kind and familiar, and talked to people 
on the way. Now if he should overtake 
Jesus on the road, and he going to the same 
market-town, what would he do with him ? 
Why, he would ask him to ride, and give 
him a good seat on his sleigh, on his bags of 
wheat. But what would he do when he came 
to his half-way house ? Would he leave 
Jesus sitting on the load of wheat in the 
wintry wind, while he himself went into the 
bar-room for his whisky ? Or would he 
take him into the bar with him } 

He interrupted me at this point, and said 
he *' did n't think it was right to talk about 
our Lord in that way." But he would not 
answer my question. My dear boy, we need 
to find Christ's tracks every day in the week. 
We want to have him with us every-where 
and at all times. And if it would degrade 
Christ to be with us and to do as we do, then 
we are degrading ourselves by going where 



6 THE PRIXT OF HIS SHOE. 

Christ would not go, and doing what Christ 
would not do. Now that is one very good 
way of finding ^' the prints of Christ's shoe 
in the earth." And the habit of thinking, 
^' What would Christ do if he were in my 
place?" or ''What would Christ say if he 
were here ? " — this habit will soon become so 
strong and fixed that even in dangers and 
difficulties suddenly arising, the mind will 
decide at once : " If Christ were in my place 
he would do so and so " ; or, '' If Christ were 
here he would speak thus." 

And don't forget, religion is hke every 
thing else : it becomes easier and more per- 
fect as you practice it. The soldier learns 
to march. The step, at first, is too long or 
too short for him and it is very wearisome 
always keeping step with the others. But 
after a time he drops into the confirmed 
habit ; you can tell him by his march, as 
you see him all alone on the street. And 
he can't bear now to walk with any body 
without keeping step with him. And our 



THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE, 7 

renewed nature becomes our only nature. 
And we are unhappy if for ever so short a 
time we feel that we have left Christ's foot- 
prints. The pilgrim was right who coveted 
to set his foot wherever Christ had left ^' the 

PRINT OF HIS SHOE." 



THE LIKENESS OF CHRIST. 



SHOW me," says the worldling, ''a man 
who exhibits in his character and con- 
duct a perfect likeness of Jesus Christ, and 
then I'll believe that there is something 
else than hypocrisy among professors." My 
dear friend, you are too exacting. Your own 
sons do not show all vour characteristics, 
though each of them shows something of the 
father. All the world and a great deal more 
would not equal God ; and it takes all the 
world and a great deal more to image Christ. 
Yet every Christian, if he is a Christian, 
shows some feature of Christ. 

We look at some masterpiece of ancient 
sculpture, and we say : '' There is the perfec- 
tion of the human figure." But the statue is 
not the likeness of any one man who ever 
lived. We may imagine Phidias or Praxite- 
les loitering around the Olympic or Isthmian 

8 



THE LIKENESS OF CHRIST. 9 

games, taking observations. There the poise 
of a head would attract him, and draw forth 
his ready pencil to trace it on some little 
tablet ; there the outline of a bust ; there a 
leg ; here a hand ; elsewhere, and in detail, 
the various features of the face — one having 
the perfection of form in one feature, another 
in another ; till at last, by combining all 
these in one ideal form, he produced what we 
all recognize as a perfect representation of a 
perfect human figure. So with the likeness 
of Christ among men. You can not find it, 
or any thing nearly approaching it, in any one 
man or any one circle of men. But pick 
out the likeness of Christ among Christians, 
feature by feature, and there is more of 
the likeness of the great Master than we 
imagine. 

The sister of a little boy had died. It was 
before the age of photographs, and no like- 
ness remained of the lost dear one but in the 
fond memories of her friends. The little 
brother was inconsolable. 



lO THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE, 

" Could n't somebody paint a picture of 
sister?'' 

But the parents reasoned : '' But you have 
no little picture or any thing to show the 
painter. How could he tell what your sister 
looked like ? " 

" I could tell him," said the boy. 

At last, to gratify and console the little 
fellow, he was sent to Boston on a visit to 
friends, and authorized to make the attempt 
to find a painter who could produce the like- 
ness of a girl he had never seen and of whom 
no likeness remained. He went to one painter 
and then to another. But they shook their 
heads. At last one, younger perhaps and 
more enthusiastic, said to the boy : — 

*^ Come with me where we can see many 
pictures of people, and point out one that 
looks like your sister." 

They went to a gallery of portraits. 

" That is like her eyes," he said, pointing 
to one. *' Her hair was like that," he again 
exclaimed. ^* Her mouth was like that. 



THE LIKENESS OF CHRIST, II 

That is her forehead." And thus, feature 
after feature, he pointed out the likeness of 
his dead sister. And the painter, by combin- 
ing all these in one, made a portrait that 
all her friends said was a perfect image of 
the loved and lost one. Are we hypocrites 
because we each can show but some one 
feature of our blessed Lord ? 



ASSURANCE. 



OUR salvation depends on the meritorious 
work of Christ, and his truth in telling 
us of it. But I can not judge of Christ's truth 
by looking into my own heart. I may find 
whether I believe him ; but his worthiness 
to be believed is to me a matter of evidence, 
not of feeling. There is a serious mistake 
made here by many who have no assurance, 
because they are not considering ** the record 
that God gave of his Son,'* but only their 
own feelings. 

I have to cross a bridge. I have heard 
many conflicting reports about it. I have 
seen some who had utterly refused to trust 
themselves on it, while others assert they 
have gone over it. I am in sight of it, and 
my trouble increases. Shall I sit down and 
ask myself : '' Am I bold enough to go 
over it ? Shall I risk it ? " and stiay there till 



ASSURANCE, 1 3 

I get my feelings wrought up to the pitch of 
rushing over it ? No ! I have taken up the 
wrong question. The only sensible question 
I ought to ask and answer is : ^' Is the 
bridge safe ? Is it strong enough ? " I shall 
not get these answers out of my feelings. 
I shall get them out of the right use of my 
senses and my judgment. I see people 
passing safely over it. Now that is evi- 
dence the bridge is strong enough to bear 
others. I cautiously and carefully examine 
the foundations and the superstructure ; and 
the evidence of my eyes pronounces it good. 
I get acquainted with the builder of it, and 
find he is a skillful and an honorable man. 
I take evidence as to dates, and I find it has 
not lasted yet nearly as long as it is intended 
to last. On every point and at every turn I 
find satisfactory evidence. Now I walk over 
with perfect confidence. I had, in fact, for- 
gotten to think about my feelings. My feel- 
ings had to follow my judgment; and my 
judgment was satisfied. 



14 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

So about Christ. If you think he is not a 
safe Saviour, examine his credentials ; test 
his character ; listen to those who have been 
saved by him ; find out what his work is and 
how he does it. 

As said an old man in Scotland, who had 
been converted in his old age and was now 
dying : '' You see, I '11 tell you how it is : he 
says it, and I jii^st believe it ; and that 's all 
there is about it ! " This is assurance. God 
says he will save me if I trust Christ. 
I do trust him (I surely know that much 
about myself), and I know he will keep his 
word. That is the ^* assurance of faith," and 
it is the only kind of assurance the Bible 
offers me. The modern " Master, we would 
see a sign from thee," is to look for visions 
and trances and wondrous ecstatic feelings, 
and to rely on these. 



INDIFFERENCE. 



PEOPLE often wish they had '* more con- 
viction of sin." Jesus says the Holy 
Spirit '^ will convict the world in respect of 
sin" (Revision), and they wonder why the 
Spirit is in some way neglecting his duty 
with them. ^' If the Holy Spirit would only 
convict us of sin ! " We are '* so cold and 
indifferent." 

You are quite cold and indifferent, you 
say ? 

'' Yes, perfectly cold and dead ; frozen up. 
Oh, if I could only be thawed out ! " 

Now, if the Holy Spirit began to work 
with you, as just now you wished he would, 
where do you think he would de£'i7i f 

*' Why, he would begin to make me mourn 
over my sins, to weep and pray, and lead me 
to accept Christ's pardon and grace." 

He would not, probably, do all these things 



1 6 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

at once. He would give you one lesson and 
insist on your learning that before he gave 
you another. Is not that what you would 
do with a scholar you were teaching t 

^^Yes." 

Well, he has given you one important 
lesson — that you are this moment guilty of 
a great sin. God has done so much for you, 
and -yet you have no gratitude for him. 
Christ has died for your sins and yet you 
do not trust him. Christ loves you, and yet 
you refuse to love him. He is warm toward 
you, and yet you are cold toward him. Your 
coldness and indifference is your sin. The 
Holy Spirit convinces you of that. Go to 
Christ with your sin, confess it , forsake it, 
and be pardoned for it. 

Now if, in respect to this life there is 
something very important told you, you don't 
stop to think of your feelings about it. 
Feelings are not consulted in the matter. 
It is a matter of its being false or being true. 
If it is true, you will rejoice ; if not, you will 



INDIFFERENCE. 1 7 

not. And you seek for the evidences. But 
the evidences are not in you ; they are in the 
facts. Just so in spiritual things. The Bible 
professes to have good news for you. Your 
anxiety should not be about your feelings, 
but about the evidences of truth in the 
news. If Christ has died for you, believe it 
and rejoice. And if you do not seem to 
be sure about that fact, for the sake of your 
eternal interest and for the sake of Christ 
himself, whose honor is involved, investigate 
its truth at once. 



CHRISrS ROBE. 



A SOLDIER might still be a soldier, 
though he had no uniform given 
him, but w^s dressed like a citizen, and 
every soldier according to his own fancy. 
But a Christian can not be a useful 
and accepted Christian without Christ's 
robe. There are many advantages in having 
soldiers in a distinctive garb. They are known 
to be soldiers. Each one is known to belong 
to such and such a regiment or arm of the 
service ; and the men themselves feel that 
their uniform is an authority and a protection. 
So *^ putting on Christ," that is, becoming a 
professed Christian, is a great advantage to 
the believer. It reminds him of what he is 
and it encourages others. But the principal 
sense in which it is to be understood, is our 
taking Christ for our moral character in which 
to stand before God. 

i8 



CHRIST'S ROBE. I9 

Justification is an acquittal from guilt. 
Paul says : ^^By whom ye have now received 
the atonement ; " that is, putting on Christ 
for our justification. It is an acceptance 
of us as righteous. Now we have no good- 
ness or righteousness of our own ; it is 
all Christ's. And when God looks at us he 
wants to see if we have Christ's righteous- 
ness, just as a commander looks at a man, and 
knows by his having on the uniform that he 
is one of his soldiers. So God knows Christ's 
robe wherever he sees it. It may be on my 
unworthy shoulders, but if it is Christ's robe, 
and I am wearing it, I am accepted for the 
sake of him who has given me the robe 
to wear. 

Hear a little parable. There was a beauti- 
ful city, and a good king reigned there, 
and all the people in it were very happy. 
But it was pure as well as happy, and it was 
happy because it was pure. And the law of 
the city was that no one who was unworthy 
should come in there. Outside one of the gates 



20 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

a poor man sat on a stone. He often could 
see in a little, when the gate was opened ; but 
he was afraid to try to go in, for he knew he 
w^as not worthy. The prince, the king's son, 
took a walk out and saw this poor man sitting, 
and spoke kindly to him. He asked him if 
he would like to go in. He said. Yes, only 
he w^as not worthy ; and so it was against the 
law for him to go in. 

**Well," said the prince, ^' I am worthy, 
and any body I take in will be accepted and 
considered as worthy, if he is in my company. 
So come with me." 

So the poor man got up, and the prince 
put his arm around him and flung one corner 
of his princely robe over the man's shoulders, 
so that the one robe covered them both ; and 
thus they went towards the gate. And 
when the keepers of the gate saw them 
coming, they sent word to the king that 
''the prince was coming, and he had with 
him a man who was not worthy." And the 
king gave orders to '' admit both the prince 



CHRIST S ROBE. 21 

and any man the prince had with him ; for 
his worthiness made the other worthy." 

We need not be afraid that God will fail 
to recognize the robe of Christ wherever he 
sees it. Jacob knew Joseph's coat when it 
came home to him dabbled in blood. '' It is 
my son's coat ! " he cried. The father of 
Lord William Russell knew the headless 
body of his son, it is said, as he stood by his 
coffin, and said : '' I would not give my dead 
son for the living son of any man in Chris- 
tendom." After Richard Cameron had fallen 
at Ayrs-moss, and his head and hands, before 
they were nailed up over the gates of Edin- 
burgh, were brought in to his old father, who 
was in prison for conscience' sake, — with a 
purpose thus to add to his misery, — and he was 
asked if he knew whose they were, he took 
them tenderly in his hands and said: '* They 
are my dear son's. God has been very mer- 
ciful to me and mine." 

And if it is thus with human fathers, will 
God see his Son's robe on us, and not know 
it and not accept it 1 



THE CITY LIETH FOUR-SQUARE. 



PROBABLY the principal idea to be 
gathered from the city's lying four- 
square is the perfection and symmetry of 
its plan. It all existed in God's thought 
from eternity, perfect and holy, and need- 
ing no additions or ^'improvements" like 
cities of. man's building. And the three 
gates on every side may remind us of the 
sanctuary in the wilderness in the center of 
the camp, with three tribes encamped on 
each side of it — an ancient suggestion of 
heaven ; for Dr. Binney was right when he 
said that '' all Old Testament facts were 
doctrines ; " and all nations and people of 
the earth may equally come into it and 
on the same terms. 

But perhaps for a moment we might put 
a finer point upon it still, and say that you 
may come to God from all the various sides 



THE CITY LIETH FOUR-SQUARE, 23 

of human experience and feeling. You may 
come in at the east gates, with the morning 
sun upon you, in all the fresh and joyous 
feelings of a consecrated youth. And happy 
are they who thus come. What a pity to 
give the best of our youth to the world, when 
it might have been given to God ! It is 
a mistake and a loss which we find, all our 
life, can never be fully repaired. 

Or you may com.e in at the south gates, 
led by the fervid warmth of your emotions. 
Mary, she of the alabaster box, came thus. 
Many people do thus enter by the south 
gates ; more than by the north. Our warm 
emotions were given us for the very purpose 
that they should rise up toward God, as the 
fire ascends towards the sun. And if we 
begin to be so full of love to God that 
we can not keep away from him, w^e shall be 
glad that the south gates are so invitingly 
near and so easy of access. 

Or you may enter by the north gates, cool 
and intellectual, compelled to believe by the 



24 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

s the Christ. Some men who thus come to 
God are very strong in faith. As the Ho v 
Spirit, working through their reason K^ 
compelled them to belfeve, so nothrg 'short 

Or you may enter by the sunset ^ates 
urnin back, as it were, almost, but not qu e 
too late : your whole life a long day of wan 
dering, but getting home at last The wide" 
path in error ; the last turning only ri^ht How 
touching is the testimony of some fho favl 

to makeThf ""1 1 f ^'^ ' «- -^^ 
to make the most of the time that is left and 

come in on the eastern side, as the worshipers 
entered the temple of old ^snipers 

But thanks be to God, the street from every 

TgoU' T' '^'IT' — -thethronT 
ot God ! There is the same salvation the 

you will. Only, It IS present rebellion and 



THE CITY LIETH FOUR-SQUARE. 25 

present sin not to come at once ; and there is 
eternal danger in the delay. The east gates 
would not have been opened if it had been 
none of your duty to enter thereby ; and to 
pass by them is to run the risk of never 
entering the City at all. 



THE JUBILEE. 



WHETHER it was every forty -nine 
years or every fifty years did not so 
much matter to the poor Hebrew, as to know 
that it was sure to come at the right time. I 
think, however, it was every forty-nine years. 
Every seven years came the Sabbatic year, 
the year of rest ; and every seven Sabbatic 
years brought round the great Sabbatic 
year, the Jubilee. 

The land all went back to the old proprie- 
tors ; and it taught the people that the land 
was God's. This family or that family might 
have it for their '^ inheritance ; '' but after 
all, they only '* occupied" it under the great 
Proprietor. How a pious Hebrew would 
think : *^ My ancestor had this little farm given 
to him by Joshua, hundreds of years ago. 
God has restored it to me, and will give it to 
my children after me. The earth is Jeho- 
26 



THE JUBILEE, 2J 

vah's, and the fullness thereof." When 
William Rufus of England was found dead 
in New Forest, we read in history that a 
woodman named Purkis took the body in 
his cart to Winchester. And Henry I gave 
him, as a reward, two acres of ground where 
his cottage stood in the forest. And a very 
dear friend of mine, the Rev. George Purkis, 
tells me that small estate of two acres has 
been for eight hundred years in the family, 
and is in the family still. He himself is a 
direct descendant of the old woodman, and a 
near relative of the present owner. Christ 
says: ** The meek shall inherit the earth;" 
not inherit the world, the globe, but the 
land, the '' soil," the portions of their fathers 
before them. '^They shall not be rooted out 
of the soil." 

And the bondmen were all set free. Many 
a time it would happen that a man would get so 
much *' behind" that he saw no possible way 
of getting out of debt and still preserve 
his liberty. Think of the poor widow who 



28 THE PRmr OF HIS SHOE, 

came to Elisha: ^^Thy servant, my husband, 
is dead. And thou knowest thy servant did 
fear the Lord. And the creditor is come to 
take unto him my two sons to be bondmen.'' 
Thus it must often have been in old times. 
But how they would count the years, then 
the months, then the days, till the year 
of Jubilee came in ! 

The Roman law had far less mercy than 
the Hebrew law. The third of the twelve 
tables of the Roman law provided that if a 
man was sued for debt before a judge, he 
should have thirty days to make up the 
money. If he did not, or could not, the cred- 
itor could throw him into prison for sixty 
days. He must, however, give him one pound 
of flour daily to live on. And during this 
period of sixty days, proclamation must be 
made on two several market-days, stating 
the circumstances; so that, if he had any 
friends they might come forward and release 
him. At the end of the sixty days, if no one 
appeared to pay his debt, he was handed over 



4i 



THE JUBILEE. 29 

to the creditor, who could either kill him or 
make him a slave. It was a terrible thing, in 
those days, to be in debt and have nothing 
to pay. Just the position, exactly, the sinner 
is in with respect to his sins in the matter of 
God's broken law. 

Now, not all the bondmen would be equally 
miserable. Some would be well fed, and only 
moderate work exacted from them. We might 
speak to such a slave and say : — 

" You have good food and are well lodged 
and kindly treated. Why can't you be con- 
tent } " 

" Oh," he would say, ^* I am a slave. I 
must live and die away from my family and 
my home." 

And so the poor slave of Satan can not be 
content, however '^well off" he may seem to 
be. When God made the soul he put a spark 
of heavenly patriotism, in it ; and it never 
*' can sing the Lord's song in a strange land." 
And on behalf of every enslaved sinner we 
thank God for that. The sinner will do it 
for himself when he is converted. 



30 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

And notice, too, that the year of Jubilee 
began on the day of atonement. First par 
don, and then blessing; first the atonement 
tor sm, and then freedom from sin " If the 
Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be 
free mdeed. ' 

It was all a beautifully acted parable, or 
object lesson, to teach God's ways of dealing 
with poor sinners, and so wisely arranged 
that It conferred a great incidental blessing 
in the meantime. 



MY WILL, WHICH IS MYSELF. 



MY will is myself. And when I com- 
plain that my will is opposed to God, 
it simply means, if I take its true meaning, 
that I make myself God's enemy. My will 
is not something distinct from myself, but 
the inner principle, the soul, the mind. The 
will is the ego: that which constitutes my 
personality. But my feelings or emotions 
are not myself. They belong to me — as my 
clothes belong to me — but they are not I. 
My will is myself ; and I can and ought to 
control myself. But I can not always control 
my feelings and emotions. Especially are 
they rebellious when I would claim them all 
and fully for Christ and his service. What, 
then, shall I do 1 Shall I sit down and wait, 
as others do, '^till I can feel more deeply''.'* 
or "till I get my feelings all right " .^ Let 
me answer by an illustration : — 



31 



32 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

A city had rebelled against a good and 
paternal king. He came to besiege it. It 
had a citadel (so thought) which commanded 
and dominated the city. Whoever possessed 
the citadel held the city. The commander 
of this city and fortress determined to sur- 
render. He treated with the king. One 
morning the royal standard was seen floating 
over the citadel. The royal troops were in 
possession. The king was there and was 
just issuing a proclamation of amnesty or 
pardon. The citizens were furious : *' They 
had been betrayed ! " The rabble was de- 
termined to "carry on the war." The king 
does not reproach the commander for not 
having taken counsel of the citizens, or for 
not winning over the rabble to his views be- 
fore surrendering the fortress. *'I knew I 
could not bring the rabble over," said the 
late commander to the king, " and so I took 
no counsel with them. I could surrender the 
fortress, and that I did. Thou must put 
down the rabble ! " A year later we visit the 



MV WILL, WHICH IS MYSELF, 33 

city, and all is quiet. The unruly populace 
is loyal and peaceable. They found that 
when the citadel was given up, it was in vain 
to think of further resistance. 

That citadel is my soul, my inner self, 
my will. I can not bring my feelings (the 
''rabble") into subjection; but Christ can. 
I can, however, surrender to him the cita- 
del, the soul ; and he will bring my feelings 
and emotions into complete subjection. Bet- 
ter than any possible control of mine. 

For Christ to come 

And make his home 

In the poor dwelling of my soul ! 

Try it, dear friend, try it ! Give Christ 
your will. And when you surrender your 
will, which is surrendering yourself, — with- 
out first waiting to get your feelings, your 
emotions, all right, — your emotions will, of 
necessity, soon follow. We have all often 
done what we did not feel inclined to do ; 
and have done it just because it was right 



34 



THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 



and proper to do it ; and we soon found that 
we began to like it better as we continued 
it. The will must rule the emotions, not the 
emotions control the will. ''Give me thine 
heart ! " that is the command. 



THE CONSCIENCE. 



THE conscience is God's consul in the 
soul. I see a foreign flag flying in one 
of our cities, and I learn that the foreign 
consul lives there. That house is, by the 
unwritten law of nations, a part of the foreign 
country. No legal process from our courts 
runs there. The consul came from his own 
country and is amenable only to his own coun- 
try's laws. Man's soul was originally an ema- 
nation from God, and that department of its 
action that we call conscience seems to be 
the only part of it that still retains a memory 
of the lost communion of Eden. 

In Brock's Life of Havelock we are told 
of a former British '' resident " in Cashmere. 
The people were very unfriendly and suspi- 
cious and, as if to bring trouble to a crisis, 
the rajah died, and several of his wives deter- 
mined to obtain heaven by being burned 

35 



36 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

alive upon their husband's funeral pile. The 
treaty with the British was such that the 
consent of the resident must first be ob- 
tained before the suttee could take place ; and 
the already exasperated populace was ready 
to break out into violence and murder, if that 
consent were even delayed. The resident 
had no troops and was sick in bed ; he had 
no helper but God. He calmly expostulated 
with the deputation that waited on him ; 
told them that even in their own most an- 
cient religious books such practices were 
condemned ; that they would offend the Brit- 
ish government, whom it was their interest 
to please ; and that the thing was wrong 
of itself. And then, like Luther at the Diet 
of Worms, he was ready to say : '' God help 
me ! I can do no more ! " But the resident 
was not murdered, the populace did not 
break out, and the women were not burned. 
God was there. 

Conscience is that resident in the domain 
of the soul. We have not tw^o spiritual enti- 



THE CONSCIENCE. 37 

ties within us — the soul and the conscience. 
We have but one immaterial part, which 
we call variously the soul, the spirit, or the 
mind. And the conscience is but the soul 
in one department of its action. I see an 
elderly gentleman walking the street and 
attending to ordinary matters of business. 
To-day he is but a citizen. Yesterday, 
however, he was a judge. I saw him in 
court hearing and deciding causes. To-mor- 
row he is announced to preside at a meeting 
of learned men, and will for the time be a 
philosopher. But it is the same man in all 
these different positions. So with my soul : 
it is the same, but variously engaged. When 
my soul becomes an historian and recalls 
the past, I call it memory ; when it becomes 
a seer and peers into the western sky, where 
the evening clouds of this life are golden 
with a reflected radiance, — from whence, I 
can not see, — I call it hope ; when my soul 
is stirred up to think of others rather than 
myself, — to see with others' eyes and feel with 



38 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE, 

others' hearts and live with others' Hves, — I 
call it love. And when the soul becomes a 
judge and sits in review upon its own actions, 
and bound, as every good judge is, by the 
law, and not by consanguinity to the offender, 
we call it conscience. 



ACTED PARABLES. 



*' TT WITHOUT a parable spake he not to 
V V them," we are told of Christ. And 
again : '' When he was alone, he expounded 
all things to his disciples." But Jesus some- 
times taught by acted parables, as well as 
spoken parables. Probably we are to take 
that as an acted parable (Mark 8), where 
Jesus led the blind man out of the town and 
restored his sight gradually. And the curs- 
ing of the barren fig-tree was an acted para- 
ble to teach faith. 

And I have no doubt that Christ repeated 
his parables over and over again, as occasion 
required. I know that Moody repeated anec- 
dotes in America, and afterwards the same 
in Edinburgh ; then in London, and then in 
America again. And by that time people 
were reading them in a book, somebody hav- 
ing gathered them from his oral utterances. 



39 



40 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

And some one might say : " Ah, I heard him 
give that anecdote ; but there was more of it 
— a sequel, which is not given here. I like it 
better as I heard it/' And yet the stenog- 
rapher was perfectly correct who reported 
it. He reported it as he heard it ; and the 
other man remembered it as he heard it. 
This will explain most of the alleged discre- 
pancies in the Gospels. 

The parable of the marriage supper has in 
Matthew a sequel which is wanting in Luke. 
Why is it necessary for us to decide that 
Jesus used this parable only once, or always 
gave it exactly the same.-^ In Matthew's 
sequel, which may be called '^The Sifting of 
the Guests," there is a deep lesson for us as 
to the way we come to God. We can not 
come on any ground personal to ourselves ; 
it must be wholly on the ground of Christ's 
worthiness : we must have on the '' wedding 
garment." The first part of the parable 
shows how men wickedly put off obeying and 
coming to God ; and also, how the poorest, the 



ACTED PARABLES. 4 1 

most despised, and the most unlikely are 
bidden and exhorted to come. Sometimes 
'there would be more need for the one part 
of the parable, and sometimes for the other ; 
for I have no doubt it was often repeated. 

Having repeated in a meeting an anec 
dote of a man who went to Perth to do some 
work for the Lord, in the hearing of a minis- 
ter now deceased, this brother called out to 
me in another meeting : '' Tell us about the 
man who went to Perth ; " and I gave it again. 
So it comes to pass with every public teacher. 

And we may learn this too : that Jesus 
would not only have us understand his para- 
bles, spoken and acted, but he gives them to 
us as examples of what can be done by illus- 
trative teaching ; and we have the liberty, 
and by experience find the advantage, of 
making parables and bringing forward illus- 
trations on every hand. 



READING BETWEEN THE LINES. 



''\T 7HAT does that mean, papa?" said 

V V little Edwin. ^^ I can't see any thing 
between the lines but white paper." 

"It means," said his father, ''that you 
must understand what the words are written 
for. Now, intelligent children will often 
know the meaning of the words well enough, 
and yet not know why the author wrote the 
words. Knowing that may be said to be 
reading 'between the lines.' Or, sometimes 
there is a deeper, further meaning than ap- 
pears on the surface : there is something you 
have to gather which is not spoken, and that 
is reading 'between the lines.' " 

" Our lesson next Sunday is the parable 
of the sower. Now, is there any thing ' be- 
tween the lines there ' ? " 

" Why, our Lord tells you himself what it 
all means." 



42 



READING BETWEEN THE LINES. 43 

'* Oh, yes, I know ; but that was maybe for 
the Jews, or the people in old times. But if 
Jesus were speaking it now, or explaining it 
right in our Bible class, I wonder what he 
would say ! " 

'* Well, suppose I try to read between the 
lines of that parable. Suppose the blessed 
Master were sitting here and telling us what 
the parable meant ; perhaps he would say 
something like this : — 

"the parable of the sower." 

"A preacher went out to preach, and as 
he preached, some of his good words reached 
a number of boys ; but they were thinking 
about their fun and paid no attention ; and 
when they got home, they could n't remember 
where the text nor the reading was, nor what 
the preacher had been saying. And so the 
preaching did them no good, 

"And some of his words reached some 
other boys, and they thought they would 
try and be good and religious, and would 



44 THE PRIXT OF HIS SHOE, 

pray and love Jesus just as the preacher ad- 
vised. But when, after two or three days, 
the other boys found out they would not 
bluster and fight, and use bad words and do 
mischief at night, they began to mock them, 
and call them names, and work spiteful tricks 
on them. And the boys who thought they 
would try to be good got angry, and seemed 
ashamed to be caught * being good,' and in 
less than two weeks v\^ere just as bad as any 
of the other boys. They left off trying to 
follow Jesus just because somebody laughed 
at them. 

''And some of the preacher's words fell 
among the men and women who were very 
full of business and cares. And the men 
said : 'We must attend to our souls,' and the 
women said : ' It is of more importance to be 
saved than to be fashionable.' And the 
preacher thought there was going to be a 
great revival and many converts ; for they 
began to come to the prayer-meetings, and 
some of them took pews in the church, and 



READING BETWEEN THE LINES. 45 

a few became members of the church. But 
the men said: ^A man can't do business 
on Christian principles;' and the women 
said : * It was impossible to be in society, and 
take care of one's house and family, and be 
religious too.'. And their religion all seemed 
to fade out, though they did not all give up 
their pews. And when the preacher died, he 
said he hoped he should meet some of them 
in heaven ; but he was not quite sure.' 

'^ And some of the preacher's words fell on 
the ears of some boys and girls and men and 
women who were sick of sin, and tired of 
being enemies of God. And they took his 
advice and went that very day to Christ in 
prayer, and said to him : ' O Lord Jesus ! We 
don't want to love sin any more. We want 
to be thine. From this hour we will be thy 
willing servants forever. We give ourselves 
away to thee. Save us ! ' And people soon 
found out that they were Christians. At 
first some tried to laugh at them ; but they 
remembered that people laughed and mocked 



46 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

at Christ and he did not get angry at it. And 
some of them went away as missionaries ; and 
still more of them did good missionary work 
at home and in their families. And all of 
them gained wisdom, though few of them 
gained fame. And when their neighbors who 
had mocked at them got sick, they sent for 
these Christian friends to come and pray 
with them. And when they died, the w^orld 
around them said they were good men and 
women — the salt of the earth. And some 
did more than others ; but all did something 
for Christ." 



ENLISTING WITH CHRIST. 



ONCE, in talking with an old soldier, 
I asked him the circumstances of his 
enlistment. I said : — 

*^At what moment, when the recruiting 
officer got hold of you, could you properly 
say to yourself : ' Now I am a soldier ' ? " 

^^ Oh," he said, ^^ I suppose when I took 
the shilling and was sworn in." 

*^That is it," I said. *'You were then 
enlisted ; you were under the articles of war ; 
and if you had deserted, you would have been 
brought back. But tell me. Did you know 
any thing, as yet, of a soldier's duties ? " 

"Why, no," he replied. "I knew nothing 
of the drill, or any thing else. I was just a 
raw recruit ; but now it was my duty to begin 
to learn, and I did begin the next morning." 

**Just so," I went on to tell him, '*is it 
with the Christian soldier. The moment he 



47 



48 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

surrenders his soul to Christ and believes 
and trusts him, he is a Christian. He has 
enlisted. It is true he does not know how 
to pray connectedly, or to read the Script- 
ures with understanding, or to help others, 
or to combat the enemy, or a hundred other 
things a Christian ought to do ; he does not 
know the drill yet. Still, he is a soldier, 
and he is going to learn the whole duty of a 
Christian soldier, and to begin at once. But, 
meanwhile, he is one of the army. He has 
been sworn in ; his name is down on the 
books ; and the Great Commander recognizes 
him as his." 



CROSSING THE RED SEA. 



I HAVE much sympathy with those who 
are sometimes sneered at as '' finding 
something spiritual in every pin of the tab- 
ernacle ; " for I believe with Paul that these 
were all ''ensamples" of heavenly things. 
Take the passage of the Red Sea and the 
desert journey. The crossing of the Red 
Sea completely cut off the Israelites from 
their former life and from the land of their 
bondage. Through all their generations it 
was looked back upon as the crisis and be- 
ginning of their affairs as a nation. They 
were before that but a host of fugitives ; now 
they were a migratory nation. And they 
were not out of Egypt till they did cross the 
Red Sea. Their faces were desert-wise, but 
they were not yet free in the desert. They 
still trod the soil of the land of their 



50 



THE PRIXT OF HIS SHOE, 



captivity. Once the crossing, and all that 
was changed. 

How like the Christian experience ! The 
poor sinner may have been turning his back 
upon his sins, and endeavoring to escape 
from them ; but he is not safe, nor in circum- 
stances to sing his song of deliverance, till he 
stands on the farther shore of the sea and 
sees Christ's blood between him and his 
former life. That is his Red Sea. 

Nor was it before the Israelites crossed the 
Red Sea, but after it, that they were led to 
Sinai to learn God's law. And he who would 
learn the will of his Father in heaven must 
first cross the Red Sea ; must first put 
Christ's blood between him and his former 
life : then he will be prepared to learn 
and love God's law. When Mr. Legality 
would have Christian go to Mount Sinai 
first, before ever he had entered the gate of 
repentance, the poor seeker after peace was 
well-nigh overwhelmed with the lightnings 
and the earthquakes. God has but one glori- 



CROSSING THE RED SEA. 5 I 

ous path to Canaan : the Red Sea first, then 
the law at Sinai, the desert journey, the 
Jordan, the Land of Promise ! Are you 
sure you have crossed the Red Sea ? If you 
have not, how are you going to get to 
Canaan ? 



CHRIST ALIVE. 



THE first Sunday I ever spent in Eng- 
land was at Walthamstow, a few miles 
north of London. The good minister in 
whose house I was to pass the Sabbath was 
called out of the room on the Saturday 
evening, to see some one, and left me to 
amuse myself with books and magazines for 
half an hour. When he returned he excused 
himself for leaving me so long, saying I would 
forgive him when he told me all about it. It 
seemed a gentleman in the neighborhood had 
been in Italy a few years before, and brought 
back with him an Italian body-servant. This 
man had duties to attend to on Sunday 
mornings, but was always present at public 
worship in the afternoons. ''You will 
have him in your congregation to-morrow 
afternoon," said my friend ; for I was to take 
his place in the afternoon, while he should go 



CHRIST ALIVE. 



53 



out to preach under one of the few trees now 
remaining in Epping Forest to the throngs of 
Sabbath-idlers who came down from London. 

The ItaHan had been thoughtful, and had 
finally begun to indulge a hope in Christ 
Jesus. He had come to the minister on that 
Saturday night, and in his broken English 
told him his tale. 

'^ In my countree," said he, '' in my Italic, 
the priests always show us Jesus dying ; Jesus 
on the cross ; Jesus in the grave. You show 
me Jesus <^/m' ; Jesus love me; Jesus think 
of me ; Jesus in heaven. And I love Jesus, 
and I thought I would come and tell you 
I love that Jesus who is alive." 

It is even so. While our sins are atoned 
for by his sufferings and death, let us remem- 
ber that Christ's death is always connected 
with his resurrection ; the pledge of our 
rising from the grave ; the evidence of the 
Father's acceptance of his substitution. He 
lives that he may love us, and we need, as 
the Italian did, a living Christ, to love us and 
think of us and reign over us. 



ONE THING OR THE OTHER. 



WE can not be two contradictor}' things 
at once. We can not be the inti- 
mates and bosom friends of bad men and be 
good men ourselves. We can not be sepa- 
rate from Christ and yet be acknowledged 
by him as his. We can not pass by the 
Lord Jesus Christ, as he hangs on the cross, 
and join the mocking crowd that w^agged 
their heads and reviled him, without shutting 
ourselves out, at the same time, from meeting 
him in paradise. We can not despise God's 
mercy without at the same time daring and 
provoking God's wrath. 

But, on the other hand, we can not seek 
God's mercy without at the same time putting 
away all trust in ourselves. We can not 
hold on to Christ without letting go every 
false hope. We can not sincerely seek 

54 



ONE THING OR THE OTHER, ' 55 

pardon without hating sin. We shall not 
seek God without finding him. We shall 
not find God without at the same time find- 
ing peace, happiness, and heaven. 



THINKING IN RIGHT ORDER. 



IN the Old Testament prophecies, the 
threatenings are sure to end with a sweet 
promise. And the Holy Spirit, who thus 
taught the prophets, teaches us in the 
same way still. It is easy for us to say : " I 
am a great sinner ; I shall surely perish ! " 
Just as David mistakenly said : ^' I shall now 
perish one day by the hand of Saul." And 
when we read in the Word of a great Saviour 
it is still easy for us to say : *^ Yes, a great 
Saviour, but then I am a great sinner." 
The order of the facts in the Spirit's teach- 
ing is quite different. The Spirit reverses 
the order : ^' You are a great sinner, but 
you have a great Saviour." 

Where there is an element of hope and 

an element of despair, it makes a great 

difference which comes last. Don't let us 

look for the fading of the light and the 

56 



THINKING IN RIGHT ORDER, 57 

coming of the darkness ; but rather believe 
that ** the darkness is past, and the true 
light now shineth." *' O Israel, thou hast 
destroyed thyself; but in me is thine help/' 



JUSTIFICATION AND HOLINESS. 



I KNOW not where I could lay hold of a 
sharper or clearer illustration of the rela- 
tion between justification and holiness than 
the enlisting and drilling of a soldier. We 
will imagine him a veteran of twenty or thirty 
years' service. We ask him : " Are you • 
drilled.^" He evidently feels that is a ques- 
tion not to be answered in a monosyllable. 
He takes off his foraging cap, strokes his 
gray moustache, and says : '' Well, I thought 
so once. I wrote to my mother, a couple of 
months after I enlisted, that I had got all the 
drill ; but I don't think so now. There are 
a hundred things in gunnery, tactics, fortifi- 
cations, military engineering, and the like, 
that you would not understand if I should 
tell you, that I am only beginning to know 
something about. No ; I am not drilled, but 
I am in process of being drilled." 
58 



JUSTIFICATION AND HOLINESS. 59 

*' Well, are you enlisted ? " 

" Oh, yes. I am enlisted all I can be. That 
was a thing that was begun and ended on the 
very day I was sworn into the force." 

So with Christ's soldier. His enlisting is 
complete. His justification is a finished 
grace. He ''took the oath" when he ac- 
cepted Christ ; and Christ accepted him and 
justified him. But, '' Is he holy } Is he sanc- 
tified 1 " He thought so, perhaps, for a few 
weeks after his conversion. "There was a 
time," said good old Bishop Latimer, ''we 
thought we could drive the devil out of Eng- 
land by the ringing of holy bells and such 
like foolery. And Satan did seem to think 
it good sport, and did hide himself. But 
when the Word came to be plainly taught 
and plainly read, Satan did see it was no 
child's play, and came out, and did rage and 
fight." And as long as the young convert 
thinks he has 'got all, and there is nothing 
more to attain, Satan is content to hide him- 
self and let him alone. 



6o THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

But holiness or sanctification is not a place, 
but a way. A way or road is to travel on, 
not to live on. Isaiah says (35 : 8) : *' And an 
highway shall be there, and a way, and it 
shall be called The way of holiness." That 
is the road, dear Christian pilgrim, you are 
to travel in — the ''way of holiness." As 
far as ''sanctified" means "separated," and 
it often has largely this meaning in the New 
Testament, a Christian may say, " Yes, I 
am sanctified." But as we generally use it, 
to mean holiness, sinlessness, perfection, we 
say, as the soldier said about his "drill": 
"No; W2 a:-e not sanctified, but we are in 
process of being sanctified." 



BORN FROM ABOVE. 



SUCH is the alternative translation of the 
'^born again" of the third chapter of 
John. The change is so great and thorough 
that only a new birth can fitly image it. From 
being an heir of hell, to be made a child of 
God. 

On this winter morning the snow is lying 
thick and soft around and over the landscape. 
It fell yesterday ; it is very pure and very 
white. But it may become soiled. Day by 
day impurities will gather in and upon the 
snow. It is no longer beautiful to look upon. 
It becomes filthy. Can it ever be cleansed, 
made white and pure again ? Not by wash- 
ing it, nor by sweeping or dusting. It can 
only be made pure again by being melted, 
and exhaled, and rising as invisible mist into 
the upper air, and gathered into clouds, and 

6i 



62 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

softly sent down again pure once more — 
"born from above!" 

So is the soul, beneath the power of God, 
drawn upward, purified, and born again, or 
from above. 



\ 



THE FAR-REACHING NATURE OF 
GOD'S LAW. 



WHEN I was a child I knew that hatred 
was a sin, and I wondered why there 
was not a commandment which said : *^Thou 
shalt not hate." And I knew that telling 
lies was sin, and I thought there should have 
been a commandment against lying. I did 
not know how far-reaching and all-embracing 
are the commandments we have. There is not 
a sin but is aimed at and denounced in one or 
other of the ten. God looks over this awful 
world of sin. He divides sins, just as we 
divide languages, into certain classes or sets. 
He takes ten great classes, or nations, or 
languages, or tribes of sins, and denounces 
them all. 

Now each of these tribes or nations of sins 
has a king, a chief. So the Almighty declares 
war against the king or chief. As in the 
63 



64 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

Crimean war the queen of Great Britain 
declared war against '' the emperor of all the 
Russias," yet the war was really against the 
whole Russian nation, so God declares war 
against the king of each nation of sins by name ; 
but the conflict is with the whole tribe or na- 
tion of which he is head. Take hatred for an 
instance, and look at the fifth chapter of 
Matthew for an exposition of the sixth com- 
mandment. The very warning that the rab- 
bis gave about murder Jesus transfers to him 
who hates his fellow-man. And John says : 
*' Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer." 
The fact is, the nation is hatred, the king of 
that nation is murder, and the declaration of 
war is leveled against the king by name, but 
includes, as every declaration of war does, 
the whole nation. 

And so with my other early difficulty about 
lying. The most flagrant kind of lying we 
could imagine is to swear away the life of an 
innocent man and testify against him of 
crimes he never committed. But the nation 



NATURE OF GOD'S LAW. 65 

is a very large one ; all falsehood, prevarica- 
tion, and concealment of truth are found 
there ; but the king of that tribe is perjury, 
and the command makes special mention of 
him. 

Another of my early cogitations was on 
the relation of the first and second com- 
mandments. I thought they had overlapped 
and interlaced each other and were indeed 
but one and the same command, but divided 
into two for convenience of remembering, 
or for some other reason. But it is not so. 
The sin denounced in the first command- 
ment is atheism and unbelief, and a turn- 
ing away from God. The sin forbidden in 
the second is the idolatry of ritualism and 
forms taking the place of real worship. And 
it would be difficult or impossible to explain 
to a child who every day sees images adored, 
in what way that very thing is not a break- 
ing of the commandment against images. 
This was Aaron's sin in the desert. He 
" made a proclamation, and said, To-morrow 



66 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

is a feast to the Lord." And he had the 
golden calf all ready for the occasion. It 
was an " improved " way of worshiping God. 
The sacred ox or calf was a symbol of power, 
and they imagined they could have a better 
idea of God's power by having this figure 
before them. A little friendless orphan 
boy, sick in a hospital in India in the time 
of the dreadful mutiny, said, when spoken 
to about Jesus Christ : " I think I could pray 
to him better if I had a little image of him 
to look at." The poor little fellow had been 
left largely to the care of heathen servants, 
and knew little of the true God. And that 
is the very feeling to which a corrupt form 
of Christianity panders. 

But we as a people and as Protestants 
are by no means free of blame in this matter. 
We break the first commandment when we 
put God out of our lives, and his thought 
out of our hearts, and live only for money 
or position or influence, or fame or selfish 
indulgence. We have then *' some other god 



NATURE OF GOD'S LAW. 6/ 

before him/' And we break the second com- 
mandment when, not being so gross as to 
set up a calf in the desert, or burn in- 
cense to Nehushtan (2 Kings 18 : 4), all the 
worship we give to God is to put on our best 
clothes and go to church, or drop a coin into 
the collection. If that is all the honor and 
worship we give to God, we might just as 
well put those clothes on a pole and make 
an idol of them, or bow the knee before the 
goddess portrayed on the coin. 

Depend upon it, God does not twice fulmi- 
nate a declaration of war against the same 
hostile king. Once is enough. The king of 
the nation of sins in the first commandment 
is atheism — denial of God. The king in the 
second commandment is idolatry ; the nation 
is ritualism, serving God in vain ways of 
our own, instead of serving him in spirit and 
in truth. Now the worst degree of putting 
God out of our lives is to deny his existence 
altogether. We may not go so far as that ; 
we may be merely careless of spiritual things, 



68 THE PRIXT OF HIS SHOE. 

yet we break God's first commandment. We 
may not go so far as to set up idols and 
images in our homes and in our churches ; 
yet if all our worship is mere outward for- 
mality, the reUgion of a Pharisee, we break 
the second commandment. 

And if our better appreciation of the far- 
reaching nature of God's law drives us closer 
and quicker to Jesus Christ, the great Law- 
keeper and our great Advocate, then bless 
God for his Ten Commandments, and for the 
fact that they are so comprehensive that 
every sin it is possible for man to commit is 
included in one or other of the ten nations or 
languages into which God divides them. 



THE THREE-FOLD ASPECT OF 
GOD'S COVENANT. 



WHEN Christ sets us free from condem- 
nation and gives us the rules of his 
household for our guidance, we shall find they 
are the same Ten Commandments we used to 
look at and tremble. If we believe Christ, we 
are saved already ; we do not require a law 
"that will save us;" we have a Saviour that 
saves us. But we want to know what is 
Christ's will, that we may do it ; and he says 
in sweetest accents, '' If ye love me, keep my 
commandments;" and he gives us the ten 
"words" that were spoken at Sinai, but he 
calls them now by a different name : it is 
"Christ's law" now, our rule of life. 

The fact is, the Decalogue comes to us in 

a two-fold character, just as Christ comes to 

us. Believe Christ, and you shall live ; he 

will be to you a savor of life unto life. Re- 

69 



70 



THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 



ject Christ, and you shall die ; he will be 
unto you a savor of death unto death. So 
with the commandments. Take them as 
the rule of your Christian life, and you will 
find that Christ's fulfilling of that law is put 
to your account, and you are blessed by 
them. Take them as a covenant of works, 
and you are at once condemned by them. 
^' So the law was our pedagogue, to bring us 
unto Christ ! " Just as the confidential slave, 
the "pedagogue'' who superintended the 
education of the children, could not teach 
them many of the branches himself, but was 
responsible that the children were led or 
carried to the teacher or professor, where 
they could get the proper lessons, so the law 
can not save us of itself, but it takes us to 
Christ, who can save us. 



GOOD SAYINGS OF BAD MEN. 



THE wise man will not refuse wisdom, 
come from where it will. In the case 
of one good and holy, the words he utters 
come to us with a force and dignity utterly 
wanting in the case of a suspicious charac- 
ter ; and yet the latter may give us a thought 
or a principle that will do us good all our 
lives. We have numerous examples of this 
in the Scriptures. Some of our choice say- 
ings may be traced to unworthy men. We 
do not often repeat the false philosophy of 
Cain, when he insolently and wickedly asked, 
^^ Am I my brother's keeper ? " though I have 
heard it urged in all seriousness by opponents 
of the temperance movement. But we do, as 
poor sinners, often feel like crying out, with 
that unhappy man, ^' My punishment is 
greater than I can bear ! " A saying of Ba- 
laam's — crooked, disobedient, and unprinci- 



72 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

pled as he was — lingers in our memories as 
a strain of sweet music : '' Let me die the 
death of the righteous, and let my last end 
be like his ! " Unhappy man ! he lived 
among the wicked, and his death was like 
his life. 

Perhaps no character in the Scriptures is 
more despicable than Ahab. Yet we adopt 
one of his sayings for its truth and for its 
beauty. The king of Syria had sent insolent 
and oppressive demands, and when Ahab 
demurred, the Syrian threatened him ; and 
Ahab sent back this message : '' Let not him 
that girdeth on his harness boast himself as 
he that putteth it off." 

When we use the proverb, "" All that a 
man hath will he give for his life," we are 
quoting Satan himself. Again, we have in 
the case of Nebuchadnezzar the utmost 
worldly sagacity with the most brutal tyranny 
and selfishness. Yet we repeat the question 
concerning the Most High, and weave it into 
our prayers : '^ None can stay his hand, or 



GOOD SA YINGS OF BAD MEN. J Z 

say unto him, What doest thou ? " Nor can 
we avoid feehng daily the importance of the 
question asked by the unprincipled procurator 
of Judaea, when the Lord Jesus stood before 
him: ^^What is truth?" 

Thus we may learn, even from bad men, 
and may profitably employ some of their utter- 
ances; remembering always that a man's 
words are often better than the man himself; 
and that with a bad man there may be some 
part of the field of character not so utterly 
given over to weeds and briers as the rest. 



DIVIDING OUR TIME. 



MANY a young convert is troubled over 
this question : ** How much time must 
I give to rehgion, and how much may I use 
for the world ? " He would, with his present 
feelings, give all his waking hours to God ; 
but he has duties and necessities that compel 
him to spend many hours every day in work 
or business, and he seems to himself thus 
robbing God. 

Now the question he asks nobody can an- 
swer except by saying, " Give God all your 
time." And it seems to him, when his 
friends tell him that, that they are mocking 
him ; and when the Scriptures tell him the 
same, that it is a riddle he can not solve. 

Let us have a Socratic conversation upon 
this matter. 

*' Does God appoint us any work — actual 
bodily labor — to do .^ " 

74 



DIVIDING OUR TIME. 75 

''Yes/' 

*' Then is there any sin in doing what God 
appoints ? " 

-No." 

''Then we have reached the conclusion 
that all labor is not sin. Is God always pres- 
ent with his children } " 

"Yes." 

" Then if you are a child of God, will God 
be always present with you } " 

"Yes." 

" In your hours of labor, as well as in your 
hours of worship } " 

"It must be." 

"And is he not always pleased when we 
do what he commands us .^ " 

"Yes." 

"Then, when we are enjoined always to 
have the Lord with us, and when God prom- 
ises to be always with us, must it not follow 
that we do not need to divide our time between 
God and the world, but have God with us 
all the time } If we can make him, as it 



y6 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

were, the senior partner in our business, or 
the overseer of our labor, shall we not feel 
that we must do honest business and do 
reliable work ? Then we need not and must 
not toil so as to unfit ourselves for converse 
with him who goes with us to our daily du- 
ties and is greatly interested in our worldly 
affairs." 

Thus, if we set rightly about it, we do. not 
need to divide our time : we can give it all to 
God. 



HELPERS IN PRAYER. 



WHY was it, when Christians many a 
time might have escaped molestation 
and persecution, if they had only kept at 
home and dropped all their meetings for 
awhile, they would meet together for prayer, 
and thus got themselves into danger? Just 
because they needed and wished the help 
that came through each other's prayers. They 
could pray alone, but that was not enough ; 
they must pray together, and thus help 
one another, and bear each other's burdens. 
The great helper is the Holy Spirit. But 
his help is not so often in direct suggestions 
to the mind as through some of his children. 
He has more interests than mine to consider, 
and his sending me help in the more indirect 
way, by a human brother, answers a double 
purpose : it leaves a blessing with the brother 
who gives a blessing to me. 



77 



78 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE, 

Our former mercies are great helpers for 
us. There are many things we ought to for- 
get, — sins and rebelUons and hard thoughts 
of God, — but mercies we are commanded to 
remember. And we can use them as pleas 
for more mercies. 

And our own human experiences are help- 
ers. Do we not feel far more disposed to 
grant a petition, are we not drawn out in a 
far greater tenderness, when there is a long- 
ing, loving, certain expectation of receiving ; 
when there is a tender confiding in us, in 
our love and liberality ; an expectation that 
will not take a refusal, and which we can not 
refuse 1 And is it not as true of God } " If 
ye then, being evil, know how to give good 
gifts unto your children " (and we know what 
the yearning heart of a child is !) '* how 
much more shall your Father which is in 
heaven give good things to them that ask 
him > " 

Your needs, your desires, your Christian 
friends, God's own promises, your former 



HELPERS IN PR A YER. 



79 



mercies, your human experiences, are all 
helpers for you. In all these ways you have 
also the help of the Spirit. 



WORKING FROM WITHIN. 



GOD'S plan of restoring human nature 
is to begin within and have the reno- 
vating influences work outward. Man's plan 
is to begin on the outside ; but alas ! the 
process stops there. To purify the stream 
we must have the fountain pure ; and to have 
our nature made holy we must have the prin- 
ciple of holiness within, in the soul ; for it is 
from the soul that actions proceed. Our Lord 
show^ed this in the parable addressed to the 
Pharisees about the cup and the platter. The 
pollution was inward, in the contents. No 
mere outward cleansing w^ould reach that. I 
knew a foolish but well-meaning man who 
thought he could resuscitate a boy who had 
been twenty-four hours drowned by warming 
and rubbing the body. And he got the poor 
rigid limbs supple and a certain feeling of 
warmth in the surface of the body, but 



WORKING FROM WITHIN, 8 I 

there was no life, no breath, nor could 
there be. 

And so an outward reform merely will 
never make a new man. The heart must be 
given up to God. Christ's Spirit must dwell 
within. The springs of human action must 
be purified before the nature can be pure. 
Have we not seen middle-aged men, polite, 
polished in manner, soft in speech, and careful 
not to offend, and yet we knew them to 
be bankrupt as to every moral principle. So 
it may be spiritually. There may be the out- 
ward semblance of a changed nature, and yet 
the nature remain unchanged. And do not 
forget that if you shrink from having the 
Holy Ghost rule over you and want still 
to keep the control of your own moral 
being, you can not become a child of God. 
Self is on one side and God is on the other. 
If we have God we have all things ; if we 
have self we have only self. 



SOWING AND REAPING. 



HOW slow the world is to believe that 
mental and spiritual sowing just as 
surely brings forth a crop as any other sowing. 
No one professes to doubt that wheat will 
produce more wheat, or beans a crop of beans. 
Yet men take in and believe and spread 
around them bad principles and degrading 
habits, and do not seem to think that these 
will grow. 

Not one of us has the right to do any thing 
without expecting the appropriate reward or 
result to follow. A bad boy naturally makes 
a bad man, and an evil habit or bent of mind 
will degrade the whole soul. A man thinks 
and resolves that he will never get into the 
penitentiary ; yet he goes on robbing and 
stealing, and he is sent there for fifteen years, 
and dies in prison. He failed to see that 
crime always 'leads to its punishment. 
82 



SOLVING AND REAPING, 83 



But there is a deliverance. Not that Satan 
becomes willing to let you go ; not that sin 
has ceased to be most abominable in the 
sight of God; but this — that Christ has 
come *' to destroy the works of the devil." 
And where does he find them.^ In your 
heart, poor sinner ! This insensibility to the 
evil of sin ; this putting off all serious 
thought ; this want of all desire to be rid 
of sin ; this despising of God's mercy, — 
Christ comes to make destruction of these. 
You may keep him out ; you have done so 
already ; but if you admit him — and you 
have, in words at least, often prayed him to 
come — he destroys all these. If a man is 
not willing to have the evil rooted out of his 
nature, he can not be saved. 



JESUS ON THE CROSS. 



THE heart-broken words, '' My God, my 
God! why hast thou forsaken me?" 
adopted by Jesus from the Twenty-second 
Psalm, I have often thought especially reveals 
to us something of the penalty of sin, which 
he bore for us — in our stead. Most Scotch 
boys, of whom I was one, learn from the 
Shorter Catechism this : '' All men, by their 
fall, lost communion with God." By sin we 
have "lost communion with God." We are 
now, in our fallen and natural state, like 
the branches of the apple-trees I see cast 
over the road-fence by a farmer out of his 
orchard, when he pruned it in the spring. I 
have seen them with buds and small leaves, 
sometimes with opening blossoms ; but they 
are cut off from the tree, and must die. 

Now was not this exactly the penalty pro- 
nounced upon Adam ? He did not die in 
84 



yESUS ON THE CROSS. 85 

the literal sense on the day he ate the fruit ; 
he Hved for nine hundred years. Nor are we 
to think he died the eternal death ; for we be- 
lieve he died in faith. But the penalty came 
on the day he sinned, for God would keep 
his word. Then how .^ Why, in this cutting 
off from God. And he could only live again 
by being newly grafted in. Our Lord's para- 
ble about the vine and the branches, or Paul's 
about the olive-tree, will explain it. 

It was this very penalty — this cutting-off 
from God, as a branch from a tree — that was 
pronounced in Ezekiel : " The soul that sin- 
neth, it shall die ! " For the penalty of sin, 
the wages of sin, is in all ages the same. 
And I apprehend that it was this very penalty 
that our Lord bore upon the tree. He, in 
taking our place, paid our penalty, whatever 
that might be. And here we find him, in this 
horror of darkness, cut off from God. 

Yea, once ImmanuePs orphaned cry 

The universe hath shaken ; 
It went up single, echoless : 

* ' My God ! I am forsaken ! '' 



86 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

And the following circumstance brought 
very vividly to my mind the peculiar form and 
language of our Lord's cry on the cross. A 
ministerial brother once told me of his eldest 
son, who had died somewhere in the United 
States. His employer had written the father 
a letter, detailing the circumstances of his 
son's sickness and death, and among other 
rhings said : '^ During the last twenty-four 
hours of his life he wandered much in his 
mind, and spoke to himself all the time in 
some language we could not understand." 
*'Oh," I said to my old friend, knowing he 
was from the Highlands, ^^that would be 
Gaelic." ''Yes, I suppose so," replied he, 
*'but he never heard Gaelic in his father's 
house. i\Iy wife and I when we were married 
— we could speak both languages — agreed 
that we would keep house in English and 
use that language in our home ; and our chil- 
dren never heard us speak any thing but Eng- 
lish. No doubt he heard the Gaelic on the 
school play -ground and among his little play- 



yESUS ON THE CROSS. 87 

mates from his earlier infancy ; but it could 
hardly be called his native language." Yet 
here it was ; the poor fellow, dying among 
strangers, wandered back in the mists of 
death to the heather and the Highland hills ; 
and he was once more in imagination a little 
barefooted Highland boy, with tartan trews, 
and the honest Gaelic tongue. And is it too 
far-fetched to believe the same of Christ } that 
he too wandered back to the vernacular he 
had learned and lisped in his highland home 
— for Nazareth was up among the hills, twelve 
hundred feet high — and now the language 
of his childhood was the language of his 
dying thoughts. No doubt he had taught 
much in Greek, — for Greek was the language 
of public life, just as the English is now 
among the Gaelic Highlands, — but the sanc- 
tities of life and death, and mother and in- 
fancy and home, all expressed themselves to 
his mind in the home-like Aramaic. 

Let us comfort ourselves with the thought 
that whatever our penalty for sin was, Jesus 



88 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

bore it for us ; and with the further thought 
that his enemies can no more reach him now. 
For he, ''after he had offered one sacrifice 
for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand 
of God." 



CHRIST AS A YOKE-FELLOW. 



BOYS have their thoughts, and perhaps 
if they were to speak oftener about 
them they would get mistakes corrected much 
sooner. In thinking about the words of Jesus, 
''Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me," 
I used to imagine "the Master sitting and 
deciding for each one of us what kind and 
weight of a yoke we should bear ; and that 
yoke, whatever it was, should be on our necks 
till death. But we are sure to learn, if we 
are anxious to learn ; and I nov/ look upon 
it in a much more cheerful light. Christ 
appeals to us to become yoke-fellows with 
him. He invites us to come and share his 
experiences. Paul had his yoke-fellows, and 
he sends kind remembrances to them. Our 
Master does not put a yoke upon us, and 
stand off at a distance to see us toil beneath 
it. He rather asks us to come under the 
89 



go THE PRIXT OF HIS SHOE. 

yoke with him, and well assured are we that 
in such a case the heavy part of the service 
is done by him who now invites us. 

What a blessed mark was put upon the 
poor Cyrenian ! not the Simon who denied 
his Master ; not the Simon who condescended 
to invite Jesus to dine with him ; not the 
Simon who practiced sorcery in Samaria ; 
but the Simon who bore Christ's cross. 
And Luke, with his usual care and exact- 
ness, tells us that he bore it '' after Jesus." 
Of course it may mean that Jesus walked 
before, guarded by the soldiers, and Simon 
came behind, bearing the cross ; but we are 
pleased to think that very likely it m.eans 
that Jesus, unable to bear the whole weight 
any longer, continued to bear the forward, 
and presumably the heavier, end, and Simon 
bore the other end after him. Two things 
would immediately occur to Simon's mind, 
and have occurred to many a Christian's 
mind since: i. He would necessarily be 
obliged to keep step with Jesus ; and 2. 



CHRIS 7' AS A YOKE-FELLOW. 91 

He could bear more of the load by getting 
up closer to Christ. No doubt he did them 
both, and we thank him for it ! 

Blessed companionship ! divine yoke-fel- 
low ! How easy is thy yoke when thou dost 
bear it with us ! And even the cross itself 
has sung itself out of the disgrace men 
sought to put upon it, and has become a 
badge of discipleship ! 

"Light is the load when his grace goes with it, 
Leader and Lover and Friend ! 
Sweet is the rest with his love beneath it, 
Solace that never shall end ! 

Come to the Refuge, and you shall have rest; 
Come to the Blessed, and you shall be blest ; 
Now and forever a friend and a guest ; 
Come to the Saviour, come ! " 



JESUS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 



THINGS go in cycles, and the fashion 
and form of spiritual thought is no 
exception. Some years ago there was a dis- 
position to neglect too much the Old Testa- 
ment. *' It gives us God's dealings with his 
ancient people, and it prophesies concerning 
Christ." This, and nothing more. But of 
later years many people begin to see that 
there is much more than this. If Christ 
was king and leader of his Church in ancient 
times as well as in what we call the Chris- 
tian ages, — and his own Spirit indited the 
word then even as he applies it now, — then 
why would it not be perfectly easy for him so 
to construct the word, and so to order the 
ceremonies and guide the history, that every 
thing should image spiritual experience and 
teach us concerning himself ? 

I have heard Thomas Binney preach, one 
92 



JESUS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT, 93 

of the great men of modern English Noncon- 
formity ; and one of Binney's root-princi- 
ples he was always teaching young men was 
that **all Old Testament facts were doc- 
trines." There is a depth in that thought it 
would well repay us to elaborate and work 
out. A friend of mine gave the other 
evening a most instructive and elaborate 
parable rendering of the marriage of Isaac 
and Rebecca. The whole story is full of the 
most apt and beautiful images of Christ and 
the believer, the bridegroom and the bride. 
And so it may be in every part of the old 
and inspired record. 

Mr. Moody, in speaking of Rahab and 
Jericho, said there was a ''scarlet line" run- 
ning all through the Old Testament, testify- 
ing of Jesus and his blood. And if we could 
imagine Christ taken out of the Old Testa- 
ment, what would be left '! Something of 
history, something of philosophy, a little 
poetry, a little theology, but nothing to give 
a man a hope beyond the grave. It would 
be a temple without a shrine. 



94 



THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 



'' Take out my heart when I am dead and 
gone," said an English statesman, dying, 
**and you will find the name of England 
there." So, penetrate to the heart of the 
Old Testament and you will find it bright 
with the name of Jesus. He dies in its sac- 
rifices ; he testifies through its prophets ; he 
intercedes in its high priests ; he receives us 
in its cities of* refuge ; he bears our sins in 
its scape-goat ; he feeds us in its paschal 
lamb; he leads us in its pillar of cloud and 
of fire. Jesus is in the sprinkled blood ; in 
the sin offering ; in the incense ; in the Holy 
of holies ; in the holy breastplate of the 
priest ; in the ,mercy-seat ; in the ark of the 
covenant ; in the temple. Thank God for 
the Old Testament ' 



PROVIDENCE. 



THERE is a misty idea in many men's 
minds, as if ^' Providence " were separate 
from the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost ; 
a fourth Person, or a separate department in 
the Godhead. The Scriptures do not teach 
us so. Paul and Silas were going into Bi- 
thynia, ''but the Spirit suffered them not." 
It is not said ''they were hindered by God's 
Providence ;" though probably that would be 
the way of expressing it in our day. It was 
the same Spirit that enlightened, renewed, 
and sanctified them, that managed their out- 
ward affairs for them, opened the way for 
them to go in one direction, and barred the 
way in another. 

It has been observed that " the Bible con- 
tains or exhibits no department of God's 
dealings with men which has not either con- 
version or sanctification for its object." And 



95 



96 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

when the Holy Spirit reproves (^'convicts'') 
the world of sin, of righteousness, and of 
judgment (John 16: 8), it is not for the mere 
sake of the sorrow, but for that to which the 
sorrow leads, submission and conversion. 
We call it ^^the work of the Spirit," when it 
concerns the feelings in the heart ; but if 
those feelings are brought about, as in most 
cases they are, through occurrences in our 
lives or surroundings, then we call it ^* Provi- 
dence." In reality, it is the same. 

Has it ever occurred to you, dear young 
reader, that since sin has come into the 
world, it is a good thing that sorrow came 
with it } Think of the sin without the sorrow 
that it brings. If the medicinal products of 
nature, poisonous when used in sufficiency 
for food, were all agreeable to the taste, how 
deaths from poisoning would multiply ! So, 
if sin had no sting and left no sorrow, how 
many more souls would be destroyed by it ! 
Now the Spirit is one ; and all his manifesta- 
tions are for the end of benefiting man. 



PROVIDENCE. 



97 



And the inward uneasiness and sorrow, and 
the outward circumstances that bring the 
sorrow, are all parts of the administration of 
the unseen God, who cares for us and loves 
us and desires to save us. 

And is it not an inspiring thought to the 
child of God, that the same Spirit who has 
been whispering to him of truth and duty, of 
Christ and heaven, also directs his outward 
life? Even as we learn to know that what 
men call nature is the art of God, so also we 
learn at last to know that what we have been 
in the habit of calling Providence, often not 
knowing exactly what we meant by it, is the 
Holy Spirit managing and governing our 
affairs and us. 



THE SECRET MARRIAGE. 



A WOMAN who has suffered herself to 
be inveigled into a secret marriage, 
and who still, falsely and wrongly, calls 
herself by her own former name, and will 
not bear the name of her husband, puts her- 
self altogether in a false and indefensible 
position. Just so with the believer who will 
not take the name of Christ ; for *' I speak 
concerning Christ and the church." Such a 
believQr has to hear his Lord evil spoken of, 
yet he is afraid to take his part. Others 
acknowledge him as their Lord and Master, 
yet he stands aloof and will not put himself 
with them as one of them. 

And just as the woman who has placed 
herself in that most false of all positions — 
that of denying and keeping secret a mar- 
riage — must listen, if her false position is to 
be maintained, to other offers of marriage, so 



THE SECRET MARRIAGE. 99 

the soul that fails to avow openly its union 
with Christ is always liable to the solicita- 
tions of the world, the flesh, and the devil. 
"You don't belong to the church. You don't 
need to be so particular about the Sabbath," 
says one. "You may drink with a friend," 
says another; "you're not a professor." 
"You are not bound to educate your chil- 
dren religiously ; you are free ; you can let 
them have a little liberty." " You may turn 
your back on the church when it becomes 
unpopular in an ungodly neighborhood." So 
the influence goes. 

And such a believer is generally "be- 
wrayed by his speech." He never says 
"we," in talking of the Church of Christ or 
of saints. It is always "they." No more 
certainly did the Ephraimites lisp at the 
word " shibboleth," than he stutters at the 
word we. 

Now Christ knew the danger and the 
wrong of such a course. And he knew the 
remedy. He says most solemnly to you, to 



lOO THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

me, to all : '' Whosoever therefore shall con- 
fess me before men, him will I confess also 
before my Father which is in heaven. But 
whosoever shall deny me before men, him 
will I also deny before my Father which 
is in heaven." 



ONE RULE. 



CHRISTIANS are sometimes at a stand 
to know how they are to regulate their 
lives ; how they are to increase in grace, and 
what are to be the principles of success and 
the tests of progress. Paul had no doubt 
often met this difficulty in his apostolic work, 
and he tells the Colossians what the rule 
and the test is : ^^ As ye have therefore 
received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye 
in him." The rule is simply this : to hold 
fast the doctrines that converted us. We 
are not to enter upon our Christian pilgrimage 
with one set of Christian hopes and principles, 
and then to walk all our lives by some other 
set of principles. We are not to get pardon 
and salvation by just believing what God 
says about his Son (i John 5 : 9-1 1), and 
then depend for assurance and joy upon 
something we see wrought in ourselves. 



I02 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE, 

Poor child of earth ! You began to live by 
walking with Christ ; continue to walk with 
him. You were saved by grace alone ; you 
must walk every day by the very same 
grace. When you first believed, it was 
Christ only ; let it be Christ only now. You 
set out, in the day of your espousals, to do 
Christ's will ; continue to do his will and 
you will have your joy continued. I appeal 
to your memory of the days when you first 
believed in Christ.' If you had the same 
zeal now, do you not think you would have 
the same enjoyment } If there were in you 
the same giving up of your own way and 
taking Christ's way, would there not be the 
same results now as then } If you had the 
same desire for Christ's glory, now that you 
have been in the church for some time, as 
you had when you were just coming in, 
would you not feel the same fervor 1 The 
fact is, — and this is the line of Paul's 
argument with the Colossians, — we are to 
remember on what ground we are saved, and 



ONE RULE. 



103 



to continue on it. It was all grace at the 
first, and it must be all grace throughout 
our life and to the endo 



WHAT DID HE DO? 



I WAS on one occasion preaching about 
the Prodigal Son. It was in a little log- 
house, where the beams of the ''up-chamber" 
were rather too low to be comfortable for the 
tall men of the little company, and where the 
little table in front of me did not stand verv 
firmly on the uneven floor, and the benches 
were not steady. Yet the people were very 
quiet and attentive. It had been a neglected 
neighborhood, and they seemed glad to hear 
the gospel from any body. In the middle of 
the sermon I stopped and said : '* Now I 
w^ant to ask you a question : When he had 
come to his father, and the father kissed 
him and forgave him, and commanded the 
best robe to be put on him, what did the 
prodigal do .^ " And looking at a good man 
sitting right before me, I said : '' Mr. Wallis, 
what did he do ? " He hitched round on his 
104 



WHAT DIB HE DO? 105 

seat and twisted up his mouth, as if he wanted 
to find an answer, but could not think of 
any thing. ^*Why," I asked, ^'he didn't 
do anything, did he?" ''No!" ''That 
is it," I continued; "he jUvSt gave himself 
up to the servants, that they might do what 
they liked with him, according to the com- 
mands of his father. His doing was in the 
coming home ; now it was the father's doing, 
and the doing of his servants, to receive 
him as a son and to robe him for the feast. 
So with the sinner. He must come to God 
and give himself up to God's will; and God's 
Spirit will clothe him with the garment of 
Christ's righteousness, and present him as a 
son. But he must give himself up to the 
Spirit, as the prodigal gave himself up to his 
father's servants. He will have the robe, 
the shoes, the ring, but he does not himself 
put them on. It is God that saves us, but 
we must give ourselves up to God to be 
saved," 



NOT ALL SIN SEEN AT ONCE. 



IN the trespass offering a man might bring 
a lamb from his flock, or two turtle- 
doves, or young pigeons, or the tenth part 
of an ephah of fine flour. Why this grada- 
tion ? I think we may assume that no man 
was so poor as to be unable to bring the two 
young pigeons, on account of the cost or the 
value of them ; and that the gradation in the 
offering pointed not only to the greater or 
less wealth of the offerer, but also to his 
greater or less apprehension of his guilt. 
David would not give to the Lord ''that 
which cost him nothing ; " and a pious 
Israelite, feeling deeply his trespass before 
God, would express it by more than the hand- 
ful or two of fine flour. 

The same gradation is found among our- 
selves. Some have more of the feeling of 
sin than others. But let every man who 

io6 



NOT ALL SIN SEEN AT ONCE, lO/ 

feels sin at all come to God with the sins he 
does feel, and confess them. I am convinced 
that if we felt our sins at the moment of 
our coming to God with as great fullness of 
apprehension as we gradually and in the aggre- 
gate feel them through our Christian course, 
we should die at once. The duty of coming 
to God without waiting first for some 
** deeper" insight into sin is not only duty, 
but safety. 

If I had so far forgotten God as to put 
forth my hand to my neighbor's goods, and 
had become full with the gains of robbery, 
and then, struck with remorse and wrought 
upon by God's Spirit, had desired to do what 
was right and make restitution, what should 
I do if much of the stolen property had been 
spent or wasted ? Should I postpone resti- 
tution till, by the toil and labor and savings 
of years, I could return every one in full, with 
good interest, and by the splendor of my 
restitution seem to palliate something of the 
guilt of my sin ? No ; my duty would be to 



I08 THE PRIXT OF HIS SHOE. 

go to each man I had wronged, tell him of 
my sin and my sorrow, bring back the part 
of his property I had in possession, and tell 
him I should never cease my efforts tiA I had 
paid him all. So let us not wait to feel sin 
deeper, but go with the sins we do feel. 
There may be sin in some man's splendid 
confession of sin. 



GIVING GOD REASONS. 



IF we have any good reasons why God 
should answer our prayers, let us spread 
out these reasons before the Lord. If there 
are no reasons why we should be blessed, let 
us not urge the unreasonable petition. God 
is continually giving us reasons, and he de- 
sires that we should use them. Thus did the 
holy men of old. Abraham pleaded for Sod- 
om by urging that its destruction would be 
slaying the righteous with the wicked. And 
he thought that surely there must be some 
righteous men there. And if Abraham had 
lived there instead of Lot, I can not but 
think there would have been some converts. 
When God threatened to destroy Israel, Mo- 
ses pleaded God's own reputation — that the 
heathen would say : '' The Lord was not 
able to bring them into the land." Daniel 
prayed for Israel and for Jerusalem because 
109 



no THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

they were called by God's name. The Script- 
ure is full of this principle. We always 
find reasons for asking favors from men. It 
is expected that we should have some good 
reason to give. 

We want salvation. Why } Christ has 
died to obtain it for us. It glorifies Christ. 
It is according to God's desire. He has 
promised to forgive us. We want to escape 
wrath. We want to be holy. We want to 
reach heaven. We want to be rid of the 
dominion of sin. We want to be like Christ. 
We want to lead others. All good reasons. 
Spread them out before God. Depend upon 
it, religion is the most reasonable thing in 
the world. It is founded on good reasons. 



THE END OF SIN. 



IT is said of the ichneumon-fly that it 
pierces the body of a caterpillar in its 
more fleshy parts, and deposits there an egg, 
which soon becomes a grub. The caterpillar 
lives and feeds, and when autumn comes 
rolls himself up in his cocoon in preparation 
for the coming summer, when he is to be a 
butterfly. But to the caterpillar thus stung 
no summer comes. Other caterpillars push 
their way out of their cocoons and spread 
their painted wings in the air, but not he. He 
has nourished a grub ; that lives, but he is 
dead. 

So with sin. We can not tell by the looks 
of a man whether he is sold to sin. The 
homely caterpillar had his future butterfly- 
wings all nicely folded within him ; but he 
was stung with the fly, and they are all eaten 
away. The angel wings God gives us in 



112 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

germ we should keep as our lives ; but if the 
principle of sin is nourished within us, we may 
look like God's children, we may walk about 
and transact business, and live and die, and 
none suspect that our soul is destroyed ; but 
when we would rise to heaven, we shall find 
that our angel wings are gone, and for us no 
glad future life remains. Dear young friend, 
do you carry within you the principle of sin ? 
Do you know its end ? Are you sure your 
wings are safe ? 



CONVICTION THROUGH EVIDENCE. 



IF I had offended one of my fellow 
creatures, and were in great trouble about 
getting forgiveness, where would feeling 
come in. My feelings would make no differ- 
ence as to the fact of forgiveness existing or 
not existing. What I should want, with re- 
spect to that wished-for fact, would be evi- 
dence. So between me and God, I do not need 
to feel forgiveness, but to know that God feels 
forgivingly toward me. I once heard Henry 
Varley use this illustration : ^' If I were a 
poor orphan, homeless child, and I got my 
eyes upon a man whom I knew to be rich 
and kind, and wished very much that he 
would take me for his own child, my feelings, 
however deep they might be, would not se- 
cure the blessing nor bring m.e happiness. 
But if I found out what his feelings were, 
and came to know that he had observed me, 



114 ^^^ PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

and inquired about me, and loved me, and 
wished to adopt me and take me home, I 
should be perfectly happy ! " 

It is of much more importance to know 
God's feelings than to dwell upon our own. 
Another of Mr. Varley's anecdotes was this. 
He met an old Yorkshire friend he had not 
seen for thirty years. 

'' Well, my old friend," he said, as he 
shook him by both hands, '* how do you do } 
And do you love Jesus 1 " 

*' Ah, I can tell you something better than 
that ! better than that, Mr. Varley ! " 

^'What is that .? " 

'' Jesus loves me ! " said the old man, sol- 
emnly ; '' Jesus loves me ! " 

Now the evidence of all this is in the Bible. 
It is there we have to look to find out what 
are God's feelings toward ourselves, and what 
God in Christ has done for us. It is giving 
evidence on the one side, and believing the 
evidence on the other. '' And this is the rec- 
ord " (the evidence), ''that God hath given to 
us eternal life, and this life is in his Son." 



ONLY ONE AMONG THE REST. 



IT is hard for us to bring ourselves down 
to the level of our race and be content 
to be saved along with the rest, without any 
thing special or peculiar in our individual 
case. Naaman wanted — so it proved — 
something more than a cure ; he wanted a 
little glory as well. He could have a cure by 
going down into the deep valley of the Jordan 
and dipping in its waters ; but he was angry 
that the prophet did not come and, with great 
deference and respect to him, pray Jehovah 
to cure him, laying his hand on the leprosy. 
That would have been pleasing ; the other was 
not. But when he became humble enough to 
receive the blessing in any way, in God's way, 
the trouble was all over. I knew a man who 
thought he could to a certainty get a new heart 
if he went alone to a distant barn of his and 
prayed long enough. There was nothing 
115 



I I 6 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE, 

wrong in going to the barn nor in praying 
for a new heart. The mistake was in not be- 
lieving God was wilUng to save him in any 
other way or any other place. And God 
did not heal him in the barn, no more than 
he did Naaman at the prophet's door. But 
they were both blessed as soon as they were 
humble enough to take the blessing in any 
way God should send it. 

There have been men who seemed to think 
it was better to be noted for wickedness than 
not to be noted at all. A conceited young 
man in ancient times began to despair of 
fame for doing any thing good or noble, and 
so he thought that to do something very 
wicked would bring him some kind of fame, 
and no trouble to obtain it. He therefore 
fired the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. The 
people and the young man himself thought 
it was horrible and unsurpassable wicked- 
ness. 

And there are people now who think God 
can not save them, they are so wicked. They 



ONLY ONE AMONG THE REST. 



117 



set up for an eminence in wickedness. They 
are a little ashamed of trying to be very 
wicked outwardly, for so many people are 
looking on. But they are wicked in their 
hearts, and they are sure they have got to 
such an eminence in wickedness that God 
will have to make some special arrangements 
for saving them. The Light that hath ap- 
peared to all men is not enough to illumine 
their darkness. The Saviour who saves 
others will fail in their case. God must 
stand amazed at the failure of his plan of 
salvation to reach them. 

But who art thou, O sinner, whosoever 
thou art, that God should refuse or be unable 
to pardon thee t Thou art but one among 
the rest. Listen ! God has done a greater 
thing for thee already when he laid thy sins 
on Jesus ! Thou wert not asking him then ; 
it was all of his own love. He knew thou 
wouldest need Jesus, and laid a foundation 
for thy salvation long ago. And since God 
has laid thine iniquities on Jesus (Is. 53 : 6) 



Il8 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 



4 



before thou didst ask him, dost thou think he 
will turn away from thy petition and thy 
prayer now ? Nay, trust him as others have 
trusted him, and be blest as they are blest. 
Thou art but one among the rest, and thou 
shalt have no other blessing than they. But 
then thou art one among the rest, and the 
common blessing has in it a share for thee. 



THE SINNER A COVENANT- 
BREAKER. 



WHERE the word Testament occurs in 
our linglish l^iblcs, it might equally 
well be rendered covenant, and is so ren- 
dered in nearly every place in the Revision. 
So our names for the two parts of the Script- 
ures might fitly be *'The Old Covenant," 
'*The New Covenant." 

In Exodus (34 : 28) we read : *' The cove- 
nant, the ten commandments." The word 
*' commandments " is in the margin ^^ words." 
The *'ten words ; " that is, the ten articles of 
the covenant. In this aspect the sinner is 
not only a commandment-breaker, but a cove- 
nant-breaker. The Decalogue itself takes a 
new aspect when we consider it as a cove- 
nant. God not only commands, but he en- 
gages. Let us glance over the commandments, 
119 



I20 THE PRIXT OF HIS SHOE. 

and see what is inferred in each ; as is further 
elaborated in many other parts of Scripture : 

I. I am your God. 

II. I will come near to you. 

III. When thou callest upon me I will 
deliver thee. 

IV. '' My presence shall go with thee, 
and I will give thee rest. " 

V. ^^The first [or chief] commandment 
with promise." 

VI. He wdll protect thy life. 

VII. '* I will protect the sanctity of thy 
home, even as I forbid thee to desolate the 
sanctity of another's home." 

VIII. Thou shalt not need to steal. 

IX. Truth shall be kept for thee. 

X. '' I have commanded others that they 
shall not covet what is thine." 

We have received all the blessings ; and if 
there is any thing we have not received, it is 
because we have neglected to take it and use 
it. And shall we not fulfill our side of the 
covenant } We look upon a covenant-breaker 



A COVENANT-BREAKER. 12 1 

with horror and disgust, as among the lowest 
and most despicable of men. That is pre- 
cisely our condition as unrepenting sinners. 
We have broken the covenant with God. 



VALUE OF FIRST IMPRESSIONS. 



THE statement of Zacchaeus the publi- 
can, ^' the half of my goods I give to 
the poor," etc., was not a self-righteous boast 
concerning his former practice, but the vow 
of a new convert, who perhaps thought that 
a certain business talent for increasing wealth 
was the only talent he possessed, and he 
would dedicate that henceforth to God. And 
this resolution w^ould be greatly strengthened 
by its being spoken. 

Few men involved in the meshes of drunk- 
enness, and who have, ''on principle," refused 
the temperance pledge, have ever been cured 
of inebriety. And very few indeed who have 
resolved to come to God, but to keep it a 
secret and make no profession of religion, 
have ever found Christ. John Brown of 
Harper's Ferry used to say that in matters 
of conscience and duty he always followed 



VALUE OF FIRST IMPRESSIONS. I 23 

his first impressions ; that they were purest 
and best ; the " sober second thought " was 
apt to be a selfish or indolent thought. 
A lady in Glasgow sent me word, at the 
close of a meeting, that if I would go home 
with her she would give me a pound for the 
mission for which I had been pleading, as 
she had no money with her. And on the 
way she told me that when it came into her 
mind to do any thing for God, she could not 
trust herself if she put off the doing of it ; 
she wanted to commit herself at once, for 
fear she would change her mind. ^' Whatso- 
ever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy 
might/' 



THE PURPOSE OF PROPHECY. 



i 



I USED to be troubled to know how I 
should ever understand some of Eze- 
kiel, for instance. Was it to be taken liter- 
ally ? Who was the prince ? And what 
about the city ? And the waters flowing 
eastward ? And if it could not be satisfac- 
torily understood, why was it given ? But 
I have learned to be more modest in my de- 
mands, and to be content that future genera- 
tions should have something new to discover, 
instead of getting all their wisdom at second- 
hand from us. 

Our Lord furnishes us the key of all proph- 
ecy when he says : '' I have told you before it 
come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye 
might believe." It is given us to strengthen 
faith when we see God's fulfillment of it. If 
it were given merely to inform us before the 
time, it would be given us with perfect plain- 

124 



THE PURPOSE OF PROPHECY, I 25 

ness. And then, it is much to be feared, 
we should, when we saw the time approach- 
ing, sit down and do nothing but wait for its 
coming. A tribe of Ojibway Indians with 
whom I am acquainted know within a few 
days when the agent from the seat of gov- 
ernment is coming to bring them their half- 
yearly allowances, and they can do no work for 
a fortnight — just lie on the river-bank and 
watch for his canoe coming. 

Take for an example of prophecy, this : 
*^ He made his grave with the wicked, and 
with the rich in his death," and fancy any 
doctor of the law, how evangelical soever, 
trying before the occurrence itself to explain 
the allusion. How impossible to make any 
thing of it! But the two thieves and 
Joseph of Arimathea make it all clear. And 
how consoling and strengthening to the first 
believers must it have been ! How calcu- 
lated to take away the horror they must have 
felt at Christ's dying in such unworthy com- 
pany, and how strengthening to their faith 



126 THE PRIXT OF HIS SHOE, 

to see that it was all predicted, even to the 
fact of his being buried in a rich man's tomb ; 
a circumstance unimportant in itself, but 
important as being a unique and conspicu- 
ous mark of God's foreknowledge and divine 
control. 

When we approach prophecy, let us come, 
therefore, w^ith the key our Lord has given 
us. When we use God's key we shall un- 
lock God's treasures. 



IT IS FINISHED. 



THE finishing of any great work is always 
a most interesting and important thing. 
We should like to have been present at Saint 
Paul's, when all the scaffoldings were down 
and the grand space swept out, and hear the 
architect say : ''The work is finished ; " or if 
it is a life-long work of history, how interest- 
ing a moment when the historian lays down 
the pen at the closing sentences and says : 
''It is done." It was a memorable moment 
when the Venerable Bede, propped up in bed, 
dictated with fast shortening breath the last 
words of his Anglo-Saxon translation of the 
Gospel of John. "There remains but a sen- 
tence," said the transcriber. " Haste thee ! " 
said the dying man. And the work was 
done. 

Or if it is a statue or a picture, how the 
artist lingers over the last touches, till he 
127 



128 THE PRIXT OF HIS- SHOE. 

lays down the chisel or the brush and says : 
''I can do no more." Or, a long and holy 
life : how the calm of a heavenly eve steals 
over its close. ''Lord, now lettest thou thy 
servant depart in peace, according to thy 
word : for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." 
But what can equal the closing, the finish- 
ing of the sacrificial work of our Lord Jesus 
Christ ? It was a work which had been pre- 
paring from the foundation of the world. A 
work so extensive that the salvation of the 
race depended on it. A work so important 
that only the Son of God could accomplish 
it. And it was finished on Calvary ! We 
can not add to it. It has never been laid 
aside for something else to take its place. It 
gives us a perfect plea before God : '' Lord, 
my Saviour has finished the work of atone- 
ment for me; save me for his sake alone I" 
Jesus knew the use we should make of his 
last cry on the cross ; and he wished us to 
make that use of it. The atonement is fin- 
ished. Xo man can add to it. ''Whosoever 
will " mav come and be saved. 



RELIGION FOR USE. 



THAT is a poor religion that is best 
enjoyed alone. It may be compared 
to the taking of food. None of us could 
half so much enjoy a well-spread table if we 
were all by ourselves and alone. The pleas- 
ant company gives a relish to the food. And 
although to be alone with God is the way to 
get spiritual strength, yet the strength thus 
obtained is to be used in the battle of life. 
If it is right for me to leave the duties of 
life, to live in retired contemplation, then it 
is right for another ; and if all Christians 
should retire to monasteries and hermitages, 
what would become of religion in the world ? 
The fact is, the heart that is pure must show 
its purity among hearts that are not pure, 
that the contrast may influence them for 
their good. 

Religion is for use rather than for show. 



129 



130 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

If a woodman would know whether an axe is 
good, he does not test it by looking at it only^ 
but he goes down into the woods and tries it 
in the timber. Or a farmer, desiring to 
know the qualities of a new scythe, puts it 
into the grass. So if we would test our 
religion, we must take it down with us into 
the conflict and labor of life. If it wear 
well there, it will wear well every- where. 

And this very religion we have tested below 
we take with us to the eternal mansions. 
We know that that man is richer for this 
life who seeks and keeps that purity of heart 
and oneness of soul with Christ that marks 
him as his disciple ; and does it not follow 
that he is richer to enter into heaven } It is a 
great thing that a man on earth may learn 
to do the work of God, and thus make this 
life a preparatory school for heaven. 



SOME ONE THING. 



PAUL says : '' This one thing I do/' And 
there is always some one thing a 
person can do. The way we have chosen for 
ourselves may be hedged up, and we may 
not be able to do as we would ; but some 
other opening will appear. And I do not 
know a better or a more Christian way than 
first to seek God's aid by prayer, and then sit 
down and ask : ^* Now is there no way I can 
turn in this juncture 1 Is there no person to 
whom I can apply .^ Is there no other way 
than the way I have thought of for accom- 
plishing this, or for accomplishing something 
else that will do just as well t " Does poverty 
stare you in the face.^ There is some one 
honest thing you can do to make a living. 
Throw away pride and prejudice, and do it. 

Are you a minister, a discouraged minister ? 
There is some one person in your flock who 



131 



132 



THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 



is full of faith and praying and working 
with you for a revival of the Lord's work. 
Are you a young man away from home and 
trying to push your way in the world ? 
There is always some one thing you can do. 
Don't let foolish pride keep you from doing it. 
When all other resources seem to fail with 
the Christian, he knows that one thing never 
fails him : he can always go to God in prayer. 
That door is always open to him. 

Ever since I got this thought — and it 
came to me like an inspiration, and long ago 
— I can see more and more its value : that 
a person is never so hedged up but there is 
some one thing he can do ; some one way he 
can turn ; some one person he can influence. 
He is never without any resource. 

Now here comes in the wisdom of God. 
If we never got into diflficulties we should 
have little or no necessity for the skill we are 
obliged to use to get out of them. If all our 
plans seemed to go right we should gather 
conceit and pride and self-righteousness. God 



SOME ONE THING. 



133 



humbles us and teaches us by letting our 
plans fail, and then we turn to him for 
wisdom and strength. The philosopher who 
could not get a college to give him a salary 
nor a publisher to issue his works, instead 
of dying of a broken heart, asked himself : 
" What can I do ? " and began teaching some 
little boys in a Sunday-school. His boys 
became divines and philosophers and teach- 
ers of others, and together did a hundred 
times as much good as he could have 
done, if every thing had gone straight with 
him. There is always some one thing we 
can do. 



NOT ONLY OBJECTING, BUT 
PROPOSING. 



ANY body can pull down. It needs nei- 
ther skill nor heart to do that. Any- 
body can object and deny. The Turk has 
been an intractable off-side yoke-fellow in the 
team of humanity all along. He destroys 
but never constructs. He denies but never 
affirms; he objects but never proposes. We 
would not wish to be, morally, only Turks. 
Such a one can never be in the van of human 
progress. He must wait till some one has 
done something, constructed something, at- 
tempted something, before there is any 
scope for his peculiar talent. Then he pulls 
down, not to construct better, but to leave 
a ruin — a wilderness. Such is not the part 
of one who loves God, or who loves man. 
To break down a. man's cherished principles 
or opinions only irritates him, if that is all 

134 



OBJECTING AND PROPOSING. I 35 

you do. And he has a moral right to demand 
of you that you give him something better 
to take the place of what you have demol- 
ished. 

There is always something of soreness in 
our minds when a faulty principle we held, or 
a prejudice we cherished, has been over- 
thrown and removed. We don't take kindly 
to this process ; and the less so if there seems 
to be in the other party a disposition to push 
the victory and humiliate us. And when 
'* convinced against our will," — which is to 
us a very disagreeable process, — we are very 
stubborn about yielding. When, therefore, 
we are in the other position, that of convin- 
cing some one of an error or breaking down 
some wrong principle, let us remember all 
this, and lay our whole case before the other 
person without expecting an immediate con- 
sent. Expose the fallacy, propose the rem- 
edy, pull down the wrong, build up the right, 
but don't expect your friend will move right 
into your new building and pay you rent for 



136 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE, 



it from that moment. Let him have time to 
think it over ; let it simmer in his mind ; let 
your request for his credence and consent be 
rather a proposal than a demand ; and next 
time you meet, your friend will say : '^ Well, 
when I come to think that matter over, I be- 
lieve you were about right." And you have 
retained your friend and gained, it may be, 
an adherent to a very important truth. 

I have tried to make it a life -long princi- 
ple never to object to any thing without 
showing a better way. It has often checked 
me in objecting to things, and I have seen 
afterwards that I should have been wrong to 
object. Every thing has a reason for its exist- 
ence ; and we do very wrong in objecting to 
any thing before we have found the real or 
assumed reason for it. If the reason is vis- 
ionary or false, then we are ready, provided 
we have something better to bring forward, 
to pull down and construct better. 

And this principle of not pulling down 
only, but pulling down in order to build 



OBJECTING AXD PROPOSING, I37 

better, is followed in the Scripture. Prophe- 
cies end in promise. Denunciations of sin 
are followed by advice and entreaty. And 
we ourselves shall gain greatly by remem- 
bering and practising the rule of *' never 
objecting to any thing without proposing 
something better." 



TRIBULATION. 



IN the pictures of an ancient mode of 
threshing grain, one man is seen stirring 
up the sheaves and another is riding on a 
rude dray, with three or four rollers instead 
of wheels, drawn by a pair of oxen. This an- 
cient threshing instrument was called by the 
Romans tribulum. The rollers had sharp 
stones, or rough bits of iron, imbedded in 
their surface, to make them cut up the straw 
and facilitate the separation of the grain. 
From hence we get our word tribulation. 
Just as the sheaves might be imagined to 
complain of the sharp rollers going over 
them and cutting into them, so a man in 
great affliction would speak of himself as 
a sheaf torn to pieces under the tribulum. 
But as no thresher ever yoked his tribulum 
for the mere purpose of tearing up his 
sheaves, but, on the contrary, for the sole 
138 



TRIE ULA TION, 1 3 g 

purpose of bringing the precious grain into a 
shape to be useful to him as food, so our 
loving Father never puts us under the tribu- 
lum for the mere purpose of bringing upon us 
tribulation, but always for a divine purpose 
of good. '' Behold, the devil shall cast some 
of you into prison, that ye may be tried ; and 
ye shall have tribulation ten days : be thou 
faithful unto death, and I will give thee a 
crown of life." 



IN THE TREASURY. 



THE Lord sat in the treasury and saw 
what the worshipers gave ; and his 
estimate was sometimes different from theirs. 
He sits in the treasury still, and '' weighs the 
gold against the giver's thought," as of old. 

The people came to the temple not only 
to offer sacrifices and pray and receive instruc- 
tion, but also to give money for the service 
of God ; and Jesus looked on. The rich men 
dropped in their gold coins or their handfuls 
of silver, with a flourish and a jingle. But a 
poor widow put in two mites ; it was all 
she had, and she gave it all. And the Lord 
Jesus was better pleased with her offering 
than with all the gold of the rich men. 

A very few years ago, in Montreal, a poor 
young man, far gone in consumption, lay in 
the hospital. He had no friends. Some- 
body put a few words in The Witness, asking 
J 40 



IN THE TREASURY. \^\ 

assistance for him. Two days passed, and 
only a dollar or two came in. But a poor 
Scotch woman, living alone and supporting 
herself by her own work, saw the notice and 
went to the hospital to see him. She had no 
money to give him ; but what he needed was 
not so much money as care and love and 
tender nursing ; and she took the young 
man home to her poor hired room and 
nursed him tenderly till he died. 

The treasury is open still, and the widows 
and the poor still cast in '' all that they 
have." 



"THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD." 



THE whole Psalm is a spiritual song 
about sheep and their shepherd. David 
no doubt had in his mind his own early expe- 
riences. Perhaps he wrote it and first sung 
it when a shepherd. East of Bethlehem and 
beyond the corn-fields of his ancestor Boaz, 
the country grows rough and barren, with 
tremendous gullies a thousand feet deep, and 
sometimes only a few yards wide. Now here 
is David with his few sheep in the wilderness ; 
and he has made up his mind that there is 
better grass on the other side of one of those 
profound ravines or gullies, and he will take 
his sheep across. There are sure to be wild 
beasts in such places. And I think I see 
him casting down great stones, and making 
all the noise he can to frighten lions and 
other wild beasts away, and then carefully 
guiding his flock down some dangerous zig- 



« THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD:' 



143 



zag path, carrying some weak lamb in his 
arms, and getting quickly across the miry 
bottom through the gloom of the place, and 
clambering up the other side, glad to have 
got Safely through. 

And then he thinks that is the way God 
takes care of him. In the terrible risk of 
being devoured by spiritual enemies ; in the 
death-like shade and gloom of doubt and fail- 
ing faith ; in death itself, his Shepherd will 
protect him and bring him safely through to 
pastures green and fair on the other side. 
Thank God for such a hope and confidence ! 



DAILY BREAD. 



SOMETIMES children think the Lord's 
Prayer, ''Give us this day our daily 
bread," asks only for wheat-bread ; and one 
friend told me of his little boy who used to 
add: "And butter, please!" But as they 
grow older they begin to think it means more 
than w^heat-bread, and more than mere food. 
The translation of the Church of Rome ex- 
presses it exactly : ''Give us day by day our 
supersubstantial bread." Only we can hardly 
call it English. But " supersubstantial," 
something higher and beyond the mere loaf 
we hold between our hands, the material or 
substantia] bread for our mouths, is really 
the thought here present. Our Lord else- 
where says : " Man shall not live by bread 
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out 
of the mouth of God." And so, praying the 



Daily bread. 145 

Lord's Prayer, we ask for mercy, love, pro- 
tection, goodness — all we need for this day. 
And many people think they can see this 
further in it too: ''Give us" implies more 
than one praying, and ''this day" implies 
meeting together daily to pray ; and where 
could the coming together to pray and the 
praying thus every day be so perfectly seen 
as in family prayer ? But no one prays this 
prayer, if he is able to work, and then sits 
down in idleness, waiting for the loaf of 
bread or the joint of meat to come. God 
gives us bread, but he does not give it to us 
ready-baked out of the oven. He gives us 
strength to work, and soundness of mind to 
do business, and rain and sunshine to make 
the grain grow. And we take the money we 
earn and buy the bread the farmer and miller 
and baker have produced. But it is God 
who gives it to us all the same. So God gives 
us faith. I have heard men dispute whether 
God gives us faith. I say to them : God 
gives us faith just as he gives us bread. He 



I 46 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE. 

gives you all the materials for bread, life and 
health and strength and skill and money, 
or, failing these, kind friends, and you put 
them together and you have bread. So he 
gives you Jesus and his atonement ; he urges 
you by his Word and his Spirit to let your 
mind receive and believe what is true and | 
reject what is false : he gives you all the 1 
materials for this ** supersubstantial " bread. 
When you receive them they are faith, and 
you thank God, who is the great Giver of 
it all. 



AMONG THE STANDING GRAIN. 



IN the East it is common for a num- 
ber of farmers to have their grain 
all growing in one large field together. 
Every man knows his own land and does 
not interfere with his neighbor. But the 
public must have roads, whether, as here, 
between the fences, or, as often with them, 
mere paths among the grain. With us, a 
path through a field would be plowed up 
every time and again trodden hard by pass- 
ing feet. But in Palestine the plows are, to 
our eyes, very miserable, and they often let 
the plow out at the paths ; indeed, they 
can scarcely keep their plows in at all. And 
so the paths follow, from year to year, the 
same lines. 

Now along one of these paths we see 
Christ and his disciples walking. The wheat 
(for it is likely it was wheat) was nearly ripe 



148 THE PRIXT OF HIS SHOE. 

and the heads heavy. And if there were 
storms of wind upon the lake, there would 
also be, at times, storms of wind upon the 
land, and the wheat would straggle down 
over the path. And so the disciples, Mark 
tells us, '' Began, as they went, to pluck the 
ears of corn." But see the margin of the 
Revision : '' began to make their way, pluck- 
ing" the heads of the grain. The men 
were hungry ; the stalks of grain hung over 
the path ; they pulled the heads of some of 
them, instead of trampling them down, and 
rubbed the grain out in their hands, blowing 
the chaff away. Have n't you often done 
the same, little countrv bov .-^ 

The Pharisees were very particular about 
the Sabbath day. They would not reap grain, 
and they said pulling off a head of wheat 
was just the same as reaping. They would 
not thresh grain on the Sabbath, and they said 
that rubbing out heads in your hand was 
just another kind of threshing, and was a sin. 

Johnnie said he wished it had been his 



AMONG THE STANDING GRAIN. 1 49 

field. The poor hungry disciples should have 
had all the wheat they wanted to rub out, 
Sabbath day or any other day. 

" Well/' said his father, '' don't forget, 
when you come to have a farm of your own, 
to turn in a few bushels every year for char- 
ity and for foreign missions and other things 
that the Lord loves. The Master is never 
hungry any more now ; he does not eat it 
himself ; but he receives it from us all the 
same, and remembers it at last. We don't 
read in Mark that the owner of the field said 
any thing, and we can have the same pleasure 
he had in seeing hungry disciples fed with 
his grain." 



WHAT CAN WE KNOW ABOUT 
HEAVEN ? 



PERHAPS not very much ; and yet, by 
trying to interpret God's dealings with 
us and lessons to us, interpreting them with 
respect to heaven even as we interpret them 
with respect to earthly things, we may learn 
more than now we think. We may safely 
conclude — for we have it forced upon us by 
all our life-long experiences — that there is a 
spiritual lesson wrapped up in every provi- 
dence, and a good moral to be drawn out of 
every experience — drawn out of it because 
God put it there, desirous that we should 
draw it out. Now, taking what we find in 
Scripture and applying the same Christian 
common-sense to it that we do to matters 
relating to the church and the home, what do 
we find about heaven ? 

Do they think about us in heaven } We 



WHAT CAN WE KNOW? 



151 



say Yes ; and we arrive at it in this way : 
we are told there is joy in heaven over one 
sinner that repenteth. Now, if the angels 
rejoice over the salvation of a sinner, is it 
to be supposed that they keep the secret 
among themselves and do not communicate 
it to the saints ? Have they so great an 
interest in a saint at the very beginning of his 
career, being happy in his happiness, and do 
they lose that interest and sympathy after- 
wards ? If there was great rejoicing among 
the angels when Saul of Tarsus was con- 
verted, would they when he got to heaven 
lose so much of their interest in him as to 
keep from him what they were then rejoicing 
at — the salvation of some other sinner? 
And would there be any thing wrong in his 
asking the angels what they were rejoicing 
at ? There would be nothing wrong in doing 
it among the saints on earth. Why should 
this experience of our spiritual fellowship — 
that of asking questions on spiritual things — 
be thrown away when we get to heaven? 



I 5 2 THE PRIXT OF HIS SHOE. 

Then we conclude that the angels will have 
no desire to keep from the saints in heaven 
the news they circulate among themselves, 
of this one and that one being converted. 
And if for one moment we could suppose they 
had such a desire, they could not refuse to an- 
swer the saints' questioning. And we shall 
have our memories in eternity. If not, how 
could we, as a matter of reward or punish- 
ment, receive consciously to ourselves, ''ac- 
cording to the deeds done in the body" .^ In 
the parable of the rich man and Lazarus there 
was in all the parties a perfect remembrance 
of this life, and our Lord never gives us in 
his parables specific circumstances which 
teach false general principles. And if w^e 
remember this life, shall we not remember 
our friends .-^ And shall we not often think 
of them and speak of them } It was one of 
our great pleasures here : will it cease to be a 
pleasure there } Yes ; our friends in heaven 
think of us. 

Shall we know each other there 1 It is not 



WHAT CAN WE. KNOW? 



153 



certain that we shall in every case at first. 
We may need introductions to help our 
recognition. Benjamin Franklin came home, 
and when the forward fellow insisted on being 
allowed to stay all night, his mother let him 
sit in an arm-chair, instead of giving him the 
'' spare bedroom," because she did not know 
it was her son. And how often must such 
cases of non-recognition occur in the emi- 
grating from earth to heaven. But how do 
saints do on earth in such cases } Even if 
the features of that ''spiritual body," w^hat- 
ever that expression may mean, do not give 
a recognized likeness in cases of long sep- 
aration, perhaps the voice may. And if nei- 
ther looks nor voice, lead to identification, 
what is to hinder us from asking } 

Do babes grow up in heaven 1 Yes ; why 
not } All earthly analogy points in that 
direction. It seems unreasonable to suppose 
that a babe of a day old will the next day be 
a mature intelligence in heaven, and able to 
take its place in w^ork and praise with the 



154 ^-^-^ PRIXT OF HIS SHOE. 

apostles, martyrs, and angels, whose praises 
are so much mingled with past memories, and 
v/hose work is doubtless founded upon so 
much past experience. And it seems equally 
unreasonable to suppose an immature infant 
always remaining just as it enters heaven. 
We have no reason to believe that we shall 
remain stationary in intelligence and spiritual 
development, but every reason to the con- 
trary. Why should it be otherwise with a 
babe } I can remember, at the age of four 
years, getting the most astonishing and rap- 
turous piece c»f intelligence I ever got — that 
boys grew to be men. I never knew it 
before ; I supposed that boys were always 
boys, and men always men. But now, oh, 
how my prospects widened out ! Is it not 
equally a ''childish thing" to be ''put away,' 
that babes are always babes in heaven t 
Well, if they neither leap at once to mature 
intelligence nor remain always as they are, 
there must be a "growing up" in heaven. 
And oh, how much better a bringing up 



WHAT CAX WE KXOW? 



155 



have they than we could give them ! Angels 
and saints and Christ himself to take care of 
our babes ; and all safe in their Father's 
house, and trained in their first speech to 
talk of our coming. 

It will do us good to think of these things. 
Our imagination is given us by God for good 
and wise uses. Why should we not let it 
out sometimes in long flights toward heaven ? 
The more we think about heaven, the more 
we know of it. And the more we know of it, 
the more we shall want to be there. And we 
may each say, as an old friend of mine said 
of himself : '' I am bidden to the supper of 
the Lamb, and I intend to go." 



MEMORIALS. 



WHEREVER there is any thing glori- 
ous or great, or any man who has 
greatly won the admiration of his race, there 
is a desire that it or he should not be for- 
gotten. ''It is only a half-sized fir." There 
are hundreds of better ones in sight. " But 
this one was planted by Sir Walter Scott 
just the year before he died." Ah, that 
makes all the difference ! It is only an old 
silver watch, the shape and size of a goose 
egg. '' An old turnip ! " says a youth at our 
side. But it was carried by the great Pro- 
tector, and money could not buy it! It is 
only a faded blue pennon ; the poorest fishing- 
smack you see has a smarter one. But this 
was carried by the Covenanters at Bothwell 
Brig, and is their memorial. 

And we are ever erecting memorials : tombs, 
monuments, buildings, societies, stained win- 



MEMORIALS. 



157 



dows, and whatever else we can devise. 
It seems natural and right. The school-boy 
carves his name on a tree or scratches it on a 
rock, hoping some one may read it when he 
is gone or after he is far away. The shep- 
herd piles a cairn of stones on the high hill- 
top ; the rich man builds a wing to a college, 
and the new hall is named after him ; the 
ship-owner calls his best and newest ship 
after his favorite daughter ; and in every way 
and always men seek and establish memorials 
of themselves and others. 

Now why should not God have his memo- 
rial on the earth 1 Watt, Fulton, and others 
have theirs in the steam-engine, and Morse 
in the telegraph. But this is only to the 
civilized and the intelligent. To a red Indian 
a steam vessel is only a fire-canoe, and the 
telegraph a speaking-iron ; he knows nothing 
of the intellects that brought them to perfec- 
tion. So God has his memorials every-where. 
The earth as well as the heavens is full of his 
glory; but it is not observed by men as a 



158 THE PRINT OF HIS SHOE, 

race. Their eyes are shut and their ears are 
dull ; they neither see nor hear nor know 
the ever-present God. But there is a memo- 
rial that can be known : holy men and women ; 
converted souls ; born citizens of the heav- 
enly Zion. These are God's epistles, ** known 
and read of all men." 

War has been man's memorial. The san- 
guinary and terrible Attila boasted that '' the 
grass never grew where his horse had set 
his foot ; " and at this very day the Turkish 
dominions, in their length and breadth, are a 
memorial of man's destroying hatred. But 

'* Nae nicht shall be in heaven, and nae desolatin' 

sea, 
And nae tyrant-hoofs shall trample i' the city o' the 

free." 

God's memorial is peace. Instead of hatred 
shall be love, and kindness shall come 
for selfishness : ** Instead of the thorn shall 
come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier 
shall com.e up the myrtle tree : and it shall be 



MEMORIALS. 1 59 

to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting 
sign that shall not be cut off" (Is, 55 : 13). 

Away with despair ! The earth has been 
getting better ever since Christ was preached. 
Every day builds new trophies and memo- 
rials of God. God's memorials — redeemed 
souls on earth, holy men and women, peace, 
happiness, truth, kindness, brotherhood — are 
filling and encircling the world. At the 
height of the Roman Empire some one was 
dissuaded from provoking the emperor by the 
argument, Where could he go to be beyond 
his power .-^ There was not a country where 
the emperor could not reach him. So the 
whole earth is the empire of God. The unbe- 
liever is confronted with these memorials of 
his power and grace at every step. 

We can not do the works of God, l)ut we 
can testify of him. We can not plant our- 
selves, but we can give ourselves up to the 
planting of his hand. 

*' He also serves, who only stands and waits," 



I 60 THE PRINT OP HIS SHOE. 

says Milton, and he can be a memorial of 
God on the earth who becomes by his own 
consent, but not by his own power, a pleasant 
and fruitful tree, however lowly, in the|^ 
garden of God. 



